About Houndmath

Working dog-care numbers, with the formula shown.

Houndmath publishes a small set of dog-care calculators. Every one of them shows the formula it uses, names the source that formula comes from, and states where it stops being reliable. That last part is the reason the site exists: the same handful of numbers are widely republished with no indication of how much confidence they deserve.

How the figures are produced

The calculators implement published veterinary formulae — chiefly the resting energy equation and body condition scoring from the WSAVA global nutrition guidelines, and the 2020 epigenetic ageing curve for the age calculator. They are set out in full on the method page.

Breed reference figures are extracted programmatically from English Wikipedia breed infoboxes, and each breed page records the exact revision the figures came from. Where a breed's article has no usable weight range, or merges several size varieties into one figure that cannot describe an individual dog, no page is generated for it. There are breeds missing from this site for that reason, which is the intended outcome.

What this site will not do

• No drug dosing. Medication calculators are the most-searched thing in this subject and are not offered here. Dosing depends on the individual animal, its concurrent conditions and, for some drugs, on breed genetics that a weight-based formula cannot see. Getting it wrong kills dogs.
• No diagnosis. Nothing here identifies what is wrong with an animal.
• No false precision. Where a method only supports a range, the output is a range.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, saying so is genuinely useful — please get in touch. Corrections are made to the source data and the page is rebuilt.