Which care page should I be reading?

How this decides

• If you know the age, the tool does not guess. Age and adult size go into the same size-adjusted windows the rest of the site uses, and out comes the stage. Behaviour is not consulted at all, because behaviour is the worse evidence whenever the better evidence exists.
• If you do not know the age, the questions are about what you can see today: teeth and chewing, house-training, recall, stamina, greying, and how the dog handles a normal day. Each answer nudges one or two stages. Nothing is decisive on its own.
• Every question has a not sure option, and not sure scores nothing. An uncertain answer forced into the nearest box is how a quiz manufactures a confident wrong result.
• A newly adopted grown dog is routed by history rather than behaviour. An untrained adult answers a behaviour quiz exactly like a puppy, and being handed a puppy plan for a four-year-old dog is the single most common way this kind of tool fails.
• Pain, a change in toileting, a dog doing noticeably less, or anything that arrived suddenly raise a vet card and score nothing toward any stage. Those are the signs most worth a professional opinion, and turning them into a life stage would turn them into a purchase.
• What comes back is a suggested starting page. It is not a diagnosis, it is not your dog's age, and if it looks wrong the fastest correction is to open the stage that does fit and read that instead.

A worked example: a rescue with no paperwork

• The dog came from a shelter last month, weighs about fifty pounds grown, and nobody knows the birthday. The age question is answered no, so the behaviour route opens.
• The teeth are clean and white and nothing in the house is being chewed, which points away from the two puppy stages. Recall is unreliable and the dog pulls hard on a lead, which on its own looks adolescent. Stamina is unlimited, and the muzzle has no grey in it.
• But the adoption question was answered we adopted a grown dog recently and they have had little or no training that we know of, and that answer routes by history: the result is the adult stage with a note that everything about the training will feel like starting from scratch, because for this dog it is.
• Had the same behaviour arrived without the adoption history, the answers would have pointed adolescent instead. Same dog, same behaviour, different starting page, which is the whole reason the question is asked.
• If the same owner later reports the dog is stiff getting up in the morning, that answer scores nothing at all. It raises the vet card, because stiffness is a symptom and not a birthday.

Would rather skip the questions? Read all six stages and pick the one that sounds like your house, or browse the picks by need and stage.