What we are trying to find out about your dog.
Dogs get about a decade. Published research on millions of dogs tells us what tends to be true across a whole population. Whether any of it says something useful about the one asleep on your floor is an open question, and nobody has tested it. That is the question this company exists to answer, and it starts with the walk you were going to take anyway.
Big studies tell us about dogs. We want to know about your dog.
Large veterinary studies have found that size tracks with how fast dogs age, that a lean body condition goes with a longer life, and that frailty goes with higher mortality. Those are findings about populations, and they belong to the researchers who made them.
Nobody has checked whether stacking them into one transparent number tells you anything useful about an individual dog. We wrote that number down in the open, and we are building the group of dogs that could one day test it.
Those findings are theirs, not ours: Kraus 2013 on size and aging rate, Kealy 2002 on lean body condition, Salt 2019 on body weight and mortality, Banzato 2019 and Russell 2024 on frailty.
Your walk is the part the records never had.
The life tables underneath your dog’s score come from veterinary records. Millions of dogs’ worth. Records capture the visits. They do not capture the ordinary Tuesday, and the ordinary Tuesday is most of a dog’s life.
A logged walk captures one, and you were taking it anyway. One honest limit, said out loud: a logged walk measures walking you were on, with a phone in your pocket. It is not everything your dog did that day.
So the walk part of the score is deliberately modest. Logged walks can only ever raise it, never lower it, by at most half a year. A dog with nothing logged is treated as neutral, not penalized.
Published life tables: Montoya et al. 2023 (13.3 million dogs) and Teng and O’Neill 2022.
Your vet’s bloodwork is what makes it sharp.
An estimate built from breed, body condition, and walks is a rough read. A real blood panel makes it a specific one. Up to 31 results come off your vet’s lab report, and two ratios are calculated from them rather than guessed.
Your veterinarian reviews the panel and reads it against the report in front of them, inside a real relationship with your dog as their patient. The lab validates the data. That is what lab verified means: it describes the inputs, and the number stays ours to compute. The care stays with your vet.
A lab verified read stays current for a year, then flags as stale so you know when it is time for fresh bloodwork.
Every number here is one you can check.
A glass box is worth more than a clever box, so we built the boring one on purpose.
What it is, precisely.
Six things worth knowing about a number like this, so you read it for exactly what it is today and where it is headed.
In this order, because the data allows no other
Publishing the method first, and saying plainly that the test does not exist yet, is what will make the test believable when it comes. A methods paper that oversells itself is worth less than no paper.
The unflattering version
Most companies publish this list after it looks good. Here it is while it still looks like this.
Until the fourth step above is done, the honest description of Tailmates is this: we compute a transparent estimate, and we are building the group of dogs that will one day test it.
What would make us stop
A program with no failure condition is not research, it is marketing with a bibliography. So we wrote ours down first, while we still had nothing to protect.
If any of these turns out to be true, you will hear it from us, on the same schedule as good news, in the same amount of detail.
The ask is simple.
This part is a gift, freely given. Sharing controls are coming to the app; when they ship, every switch starts off, turning one on earns you no points and no badge, and the app works the same either way.
Walk your dog. That is the whole ask.
Read the mission this belongs to.
The score you see today is educational and built for everyday wellness. Your veterinarian leads the medicine and knows your dog; the score is here for the ordinary days in between.