Your dog may be helping cure Alzheimer's, and a country just passed a law treating pets more like family members, and a neuroscientist ran MRIs to confirm what you already suspected about your dog's feelings. Plus, podcasters muse over who is better at sports: Boy dogs or girl dogs?
How Dogs Are Helping Scientists Fight Alzheimer's
Most people know dogs age faster than we do. Fewer people know that dogs also develop cognitive decline in ways that closely mirror Alzheimer's disease in humans—same plaques, similar behavioral changes, comparable neurological deterioration. That biological overlap is now driving serious research investment.
The Dog Aging Project, along with collaborative work between the University of Colorado Anschutz and Colorado State University, is actively using dogs as study subjects to understand how neurodegenerative disease progresses and how it might be slowed. What’s fascinating is that dogs develop these conditions naturally, without being artificially induced, which makes them uniquely useful research subjects. One emerging finding: plasma therapy appears to improve mobility outcomes in senior dogs, a result that could point toward treatments for age-related decline in both species.
Brazil Just Recognized Shared Pet Custody
Brazil passed a law formally allowing separating couples to share custody of a pet, acknowledging that animals have emotional bonds with multiple people in a household. Couples who are splitting will have to share both the animal and its bills.
Your Dog Does Love You: A Neuroscientist Proved It With an MRI.
Dr. Greg Berns trained dogs to lie still in an awake fMRI machine (without sedation) and scanned their brains while exposing them to their owner's scent. The reward centers lit up in the same way human brains respond to people they love. 60 Minutes covered Berns' work, which brought it to a wider audience, but the research itself has been building for years and it's genuinely rigorous. Your dog isn't just bonded to you out of food dependency; the neurological evidence is real.
The French Bulldog Is Still Number One, and That's Worth Thinking About
The AKC confirmed in March that the French Bulldog holds the top spot for most popular breed in 2025. Frenchies are genuinely lovable, but their continued dominance in popularity rankings is directly tied to ongoing welfare concerns — breathing difficulties, spinal issues, and the complications of brachycephalic anatomy. Popularity doesn't equal suitability for every household, and breed registries listing top breeds without that context does a quiet disservice to buyers who don't know what they're signing up for.
Podcasts 🎙️
In Dog Agility, Boys vs. Girls Matters Less Than You Think
The Bad Dog Agility podcast tackled one of the sport's most persistent debates: do male or female dogs perform differently in competition? Three hosts, each with experience running different sexes, landed on the same answer: individual temperament and the handler-dog relationship matter far more than whether your dog is male or female.
Source: Bad Dog Agility Podcast
Fetched: A Real Dog Is Being Cast in a Shakespeare Play. (…Yet There Is Method In’t.)
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is holding open auditions for a dog to play the role of "Dog" in their upcoming production of Shakespeare in Love at CU Boulder. The part is essentially comedic—William Shakespeare keeps getting upstaged by the dog, which is the joke. Artistic director Tim Orr says the dog just needs to act like a dog, but the actual criteria are thoughtful: comfort with crowds of up to 1,000 people, feeling fine around a tall actor in a hat, and steady temperament in an unpredictable environment. The selected dog's owner gets a stipend and comp tickets for 10 performances.
From the Pack: What’s In a Supplement?
Dog fanciers have been debating whether calming treats and supplements actually work, or whether the market has outpaced the evidence. The conversation keeps surfacing in veterinary and pet owner communities, with legitimate skepticism about ingredients like melatonin, L-theanine, and CBD at the doses typically found in commercial products. The Veterinary Evidence journal and veterinary behaviorists have weighed in with nuanced takes that are worth reading before you spend money on a bag of chews.
Good Dog 🐾
The Pupsicle from Woof is what happens when someone finally fixed the Kong cleaning problem. The two-piece design unscrews completely, so you can wash it instead of hoping hot water and willpower get the job done. Fill it with Greek yogurt, blended fruit, bone broth, or peanut butter, freeze it, and hand it over. Most dogs work it for up to an hour. It comes in three sizes plus a version made specifically for power chewers. If your dog burns through Kongs in minutes or you've given up on frozen enrichment because cleanup is too annoying, this solves both problems.
Source: New York Times Wirecutter
That's the week. If the Alzheimer's research piece made you look at your senior dog a little differently, or the custody story made you think about someone you know, please forward this to them. Thank you!
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