I’m still turning this one over in my head. I want to think it through with you.
It’s true that our pets lives are too short – so is it possible their longevity can be significantly extended?
This week I had Dr. Gary Richter on the show. Dr. Richter is one of the integrative veterinarians who genuinely shaped the direction of my career — books I read early on, ideas I’ve been quietly following for years. We sat down to talk about pet longevity, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation he said something that, I’ll be honest, made my jaw drop in real time.
He told me there is real, peer-reviewed research right now showing that you can take an older animal’s cells and instruct them to go backwards in biological age.
Not slow down. Backwards.
Let me try to explain it the way he explained it to me, because the science actually has a story.
In 2006, a Japanese researcher named Shinya Yamanaka figured out that if you take four specific genes and introduce them into an adult, fully mature cell, you can essentially rewind that cell — return it to a young, pluripotent state. Those four genes are now called the Yamanaka factors. He won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.
Here was the catch. When researchers first treated mice with all four factors, a significant number of those mice developed cancer. One of the four genes is an oncogene — meaning it can drive tumor growth when it’s overexpressed. So for years, this remained a fascinating but largely theoretical tool.
What’s changed is that researchers — including some very bright minds at Harvard — have found that if you drop one of those four genes and only use the other three, you can still roll the clock backward without the same cancer risk. And now there are people seriously working on how to use this technology to reverse aspects of aging in living animals. Not just slow it. Reverse it.
For our dogs specifically? Dr. Richter said it’s not at all out of the realm of possibility that pets living well over 20 becomes the norm. Old muscle could be told to rebuild. Old joints, old hearts, old brains — could potentially be returned to younger versions of themselves. Service dogs whose careers tragically end around 10 or 11 could keep working — and keep being with their person — for 20 or 30 years.
I’m going to be honest with you. Sitting there listening to him, I felt the same thing I think you would feel. Awe. The kind of imagine if we could have more time with them that catches in your chest.
And then, almost immediately, I felt my own pause.
Here is the part of me that you’ve come to know about me. I do not run away from possibility. I love when science gives us new tools. But I also believe that for every benefit, there is a cost — and the cost is rarely on the same page as the promise.
I keep coming back to the questions I can’t quite answer yet.
Whose dog gets these therapies — every dog, or only the dogs of families who can afford a treatment that may cost tens of thousands of dollars? What happens to the dignity of the natural cycle, the part where we love them well, and we let them go well? And if a dog’s body keeps going at 25, does that automatically mean the life inside that body — the joy, the cognition, the spark — comes along with it?
Because lifespan is not the same as healthspan. Twenty-five years of life is a gift. Twenty-five years of a declining body and a confused mind is not.
I don’t have clean answers. I think anyone who tells you they do isn’t paying close enough attention.
What I want you to take away is this. The future of how long our dogs live with us is genuinely being rewritten right now, in laboratories you and I will never see. And before any of it shows up in our clinics, the most important thing you and I can do is stay curious about it. Ask questions. Hold both the awe and the pause at the same time. That is where good medicine lives.
And in the meantime — please do not lose sight of what we already know works. The most reliable longevity tool we have is still the unglamorous one. A fresh, balanced diet. Daily movement. A lean body weight. Low stress. Deep sleep. And the kind of devoted love that gives a dog a reason to wake up every morning. No pill or peptide or gene therapy will outwork that foundation. Dr. Richter said it on the episode and I will repeat it here — if you don’t get those right first, nothing else will compensate.
So here is what I want to ask you, and I really do want to know:
If you could give your dog 25 healthy years — would you say yes? And what would have to be true for that “yes” to feel right to you?
Hit reply. I read every one. These are the conversations that shape how I think about the medicine I practice and how I show up for you here.
Thank you for sitting with the hard questions with me. Thank you for being the kind of pet parent who reads all the way to the end of an email like this one. Your dog is so lucky to have you.
Talk soon,
Dr. Lily
P.S. — If this gave you something to think about, please send it to someone in your life who loves their dog. These are the conversations that belong to all of us. One ripple at a time.