Old Dog Slowing Down? What It Usually Turns Out to Be

If your older dog has slowed down over days rather than months, ring your vet or your nearest emergency animal hospital now. Gradual change over a season is one conversation. A dog that was normal last week and is wobbly, weak or reluctant to stand this week is a different one, and in tick country the first thing to rule out is a paralysis tick. Never give a dog human painkillers. Paracetamol, ibuprofen and aspirin are all dangerous in dogs, and ibuprofen is dangerous at doses far smaller than most owners assume.

Every vet in Australia hears the same sentence several times a week. He’s just getting old. She’s slowed down a bit, but she’s twelve.

The University of Sydney’s veterinary teaching hospital has a page for senior dogs, and it answers that sentence under its own FAQ heading, word for word. “My dog is slowing down. Is that just ageing?” Their answer: “Some slowing down can occur, but pain (particularly osteoarthritis) and other medical conditions are common in older dogs. A veterinary check is recommended if you notice changes.” Higher up the same page, a sentence that could be the title of this article: “Ageing is not a disease, but it is associated with gradual changes in body systems.”

One thing to settle first, because the word “senior” does a lot of hiding. Sydney’s page opens by saying ageing in dogs “varies depending on breed and size”, with smaller dogs considered senior later and “larger and giant breeds often age earlier”. Greencross puts the general rule at seven to eight. A great dane of six and a toy poodle of eleven can both be the dog this article is about.

This page is about what “slowing down” usually turns out to be, what it sometimes genuinely is, and how to tell which conversation you are having. It is also, honestly, about the case against turning every old dog into a patient — because that case exists, it is stronger than most pages admit, and you deserve to see it.

The three things that make the most difference

Get the physical examination before you get the tests. A pair of hands on the joints, the mouth and the chest is the cheapest and highest-yield thing available, and it is what finds most of this.
Write down what has changed, with dates. Stopped using the couch. Slower on the second half of the walk. Sleeping through the postman. Specifics survive the drive to the clinic; “he’s slowed down” does not.
Do not wait for it to get worse. Pain that goes unnamed gets harder to treat, and in Australia it also quietly becomes an insurance problem — most insurers will not start a new policy after a dog turns eight, and a condition your dog has already shown signs of is excluded permanently. Both clocks are explained further down.

What “apparently healthy” turns out to mean

In 2017 a group at Ghent University did something simple and uncomfortable. They advertised for older dogs that their owners considered healthy, examined a hundred of them for free, and wrote down what they found.

The paper states its hypothesis plainly: “We hypothesized that owners often fail to recognize potentially pathologic abnormalities or consider them as normal for the dog’s age.”

Orthopaedic examination was possible in 98 of the dogs. It was normal in 36 of them. Twenty-four had a problem in one limb and 38 had two or more limbs affected. The hip was the joint most often involved, painful or restricted in 44 dogs. Elsewhere in the same hundred dogs: 39 were overweight, 22 had a heart murmur, 21 had severe dental calculus, and 56 had at least one lump on or under the skin.

Every one of those dogs had an owner who had ticked the box saying nothing was wrong.

Three caveats belong with that number, and this site would rather give them to you than have you find them later. The study was run in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was supported by a grant from Hill’s Pet Nutrition and one author is employed by Hill’s. And 45 of the hundred dogs belonged to veterinary students or staff — people who ought to be better than average at spotting a problem, which arguably makes the finding worse rather than better, but it does mean these were not ordinary owners.

The qualitative version of the same finding comes from a British study that interviewed 40 owners of dogs with diagnosed osteoarthritis about the period before the diagnosis. The authors report a split by experience. Of the less experienced: “Less experienced owners typically assumed that subtle changes they saw in older dogs were part of normal ageing. Phrases such as ‘I just assumed it was old age…’ and ‘I just thought it was normal to slow down…’ were used by many to describe their prior beliefs.” One owner, quoted directly: “I think probably about eighteen months ago, he was struggling getting himself up off his bed. But I just put it down to his age, and he’d gone too far in his walks and he was stiff.”

Experienced owners in the same study did better. The very next owner quoted says of their Labrador: “We could tell… we were expecting it to be arthritis.” So the finding is about recognition rather than about owners in general, and the thing that separates the two groups is having seen it before.

Eighteen months.

The Australian number is 14.2% against 1.9%

The single best statistic on this subject anywhere was produced at the University of Sydney.

Salvin, McGreevy, Sachdev and Valenzuela surveyed owners of older dogs and scored them for canine cognitive dysfunction — the dog equivalent of dementia. From 497 dogs analysed, the estimated prevalence was 14.2%. In the same sample, the proportion carrying an actual veterinary diagnosis of it was 1.9%. Their own sentence: “This was in contrast with only 1.9% diagnosed with CCD by a veterinarian.”

Associate Professor Michael Valenzuela, who led that group’s later work and who was at the time running a stem cell trial in dogs with the condition, put it more bluntly in a University of Sydney release: “People think it’s a normal part of ageing and getting old, but that’s wrong.” And: “CCD is a specific medical condition with its own neurodegenerative pathology and long-term trajectory, and vets are beginning to appreciate this.”

Hold the 14.2% carefully. It came from an online and magazine-recruited survey, so the sample chose itself; responses came from eleven countries, with Australia the largest group at 501 of 957 eligible surveys; and the diagnosis was derived from a questionnaire rather than from a veterinary examination. What the study is good evidence for is the gap between the two rates in the same set of dogs, because both numbers come from the same owners answering the same survey.

And now the Australian vet who disagrees

This site states disagreements rather than tidying them away, and there is a real one here.

Dr Andrew Spanner at Walkerville Vet in Adelaide has written the opposite concern: “I see far too many dogs written off with ‘dementia’ who really have something else entirely. Usually something that can be treated.” He puts the usual onset later than most owners expect — “Signs of CDS do not normally appear until over 13 years of age” — and adds: “CDS should never be diagnosed without the assistance of a vet. I am always especially suspicious of another cause in any dog under 14.”

So one Australian source says owners under-call dementia because they mistake it for ageing, and another says it gets over-called and hides something treatable. Both are describing the same underlying failure from opposite ends: a label applied at home instead of a diagnosis made at the clinic. The instruction that survives both is the same one, which is why it is worth knowing they disagree.

One more passage from Spanner, and read all of it, because the first half on its own sounds like reassurance and it is the opposite: “a dog with cognitive dysfunction or dementia has a similar lifespan to unaffected dogs and can live indefinitely. Consequently, it’s important to keep an eye on your dog’s quality of life. Unless another problem appears, it’s very unlikely your dog will just pass away in their sleep. Instead they can go for years, and be at risk of suffering.” Dementia in a dog is not usually what ends its life, which is exactly why the conversation about quality of life has to be had deliberately.

The list of things that get called old age

Sydney’s teaching hospital lists what is actually common in older dogs: “Obesity / Periodontal disease and oral pain / Osteoarthritis and mobility changes / Heart disease (most commonly valve disease) / Hormonal (endocrine) diseases (such as Cushing’s disease and diabetes mellitus) / Cancer (including new skin masses or internal disease) / Cognitive dysfunction (age-related changes in behaviour or awareness).”

Here is what each of those looks like from the kitchen, rather than from the consulting room.

Arthritis, which is most of it

RSPCA Australia’s list of signs of arthritis in dogs opens with the exact phrase this article is named after: “Signs that your dog could have arthritis include slowing down, stiff legs, reluctance to walk, licking or chewing joints, snapping, or yelping when touched, and difficulty getting up, climbing stairs and jumping.” Their next sentence is the one owners skip: “If you think your dog might have arthritis, make an appointment with your vet to ensure a proper diagnosis as other conditions can mimic arthritis.”

The reason it hides so well is mechanical. Answering a reader’s question in the comments under his arthritis post, Dr Andrew Spanner of Walkerville Vet in Adelaide put it this way: “stiffness or slowness on rising is often the only sign you will get for early arthritis. As it is usually a pain response, it goes away when the dog is distracted by something else, hence not seeing it chasing a ball or when food is around.” Which is to say the dog looks fine the moment anything interesting happens, and interesting things happen whenever you are watching.

We have written the treatment side of this up separately, including what is registered in Australia and what it costs, in our page on arthritis treatment for dogs.

The mouth

A UK primary-care study of 22,333 dogs found a one-year recorded prevalence of periodontal disease of 12.52% — and that is the proportion with it written in the notes, which is a different thing from the proportion that has it. In the Ghent study, 21 of 100 dogs whose owners thought them healthy had severe calculus.

A dog with a painful mouth eats more slowly, plays with toys less, and is less interested in things. None of which looks like toothache to the person watching.

The heart

Twenty-two of those hundred apparently healthy dogs had a murmur. The reason this is worth finding early is that there is now a good trial behind treating the silent stage. The EPIC study randomised 360 dogs with mitral valve disease and an enlarged heart, placebo-controlled and blinded, and found median time to heart failure or cardiac death of 1,228 days on pimobendan against 766 days on placebo. Those dogs had no symptoms. Getting into that trial took more than a stethoscope, though: entry required echocardiography and chest radiographs meeting set measurements, which is a specialist-level workup and is not priced anywhere in the cost list below. And the trial was funded by Boehringer Ingelheim, which makes pimobendan, with one author employed by the company.

The voice box, which is an Australian story

Laryngeal paralysis is the one most likely to be filed under ageing, because the early version is simply an older large dog who is noisier when breathing and gives up sooner on a walk.

An Australian retrospective published in the Australian Veterinary Journal reviewed 100 dogs operated on for it between 1992 and 2000. “The Labrador Retriever was the most commonly affected breed. The male:female ratio was 1.56:1 and the average age of presentation was 9.9 years. The most common month in which surgery was performed was October.” October is the front end of the Australian warm season, though the paper reports when surgery happened rather than when dogs first presented, so treat the month as suggestive.

Two things make this urgent in this country. The first is heat: a dog whose airway does not open properly cannot pant properly, and panting is how a dog sheds heat. An Australian study of 119 heat-related illness cases in New South Wales over twenty years found a fatality rate of 23%, and reported that “older dogs were at increased risk of HRI.” Our page on heat stroke covers what to do about that.

The second is that it is rarely only the larynx. A controlled cohort study compared 32 affected dogs against 34 age- and breed-matched healthy ones. Ten of the affected dogs, 31%, already had generalised neurological signs when they were enrolled — and all 32 had developed neurological signs within a year.

And the number that answers “he’s just old”: in that Australian series, 87.7% of owners felt their dog’s quality of life had improved in the six months after surgery. The same paper is honest about who it did not work for — 33% revisited their own vet with a respiratory problem afterwards, 10.7% had a post-surgical complication associated with the procedure, and among dogs under 10 kg only 55% of owners reported improvement, against 93% of owners of larger dogs.

The hormonal ones, which are rarer than the internet suggests

Cushing’s disease and hypothyroidism get named constantly in online lists, so it is worth knowing the scale. In UK primary care, diagnosed prevalence of hyperadrenocorticism across 210,824 dogs was 0.28%, and of hypothyroidism across 905,553 dogs, 0.23%. Those are figures for dogs of all ages, though, and the same Cushing’s study reports that dogs aged twelve and over had 5.7 times the odds of a hyperadrenocorticism diagnosis compared with dogs aged six to nine. Uncommon overall, considerably less uncommon in the animal you are reading this about.

One detail from the Cushing’s study is worth carrying around, because it tells you something about every prevalence figure on this page: “Insured dogs had 4.0 times the odds (95% CI: 2.8 to 5.6, P<0.001) of hyperadrenocorticism compared with non-insured dogs.” Insured dogs do not get more Cushing’s. Insured dogs get investigated.

Weight, which is the one you can do something about today

Thirty-nine of the hundred apparently healthy dogs were overweight, and obesity slows a dog down independently of anything wrong with its joints. In a study that put obese dogs through a weight loss programme and measured them with a six-minute walk test, the same dogs walked 509 metres when obese, 575 when overweight and 589 when lean.

Hearing and eyes, which really are ageing

An old dog that no longer comes when called may be deaf rather than disobedient or demented. Measurements of cochlear function in 28 geriatric dogs against 15 younger controls found significant losses at 6–12 kHz, with the authors concluding that “age-related hearing loss begins earlier in the life span” than assumed. There is no treatment for that, and there does not need to be — what it needs is for everyone in the house to stop assuming the dog is ignoring them.

How good is the evidence for screening, honestly?

Every page on this subject ends with “see your vet”. Almost none of them say how strong the evidence for that is. Here it is, in both directions.

Look hard and you will find something

In 2012 a Canadian group ran full wellness screening — blood count, biochemistry, urinalysis and abdominal ultrasound — on 53 clinically normal mature golden retrievers. Laboratory analysis “revealed abnormalities indicative of occult but potentially significant disease in 54.7% (29/53) of dogs”. Ultrasound found the same in 64.2%.

The abstract then says: “As only a small number of dogs had follow-up diagnostic testing available, the significance of these abnormalities is unknown.” Which is fair, and there is a reason for it that owners should see: of the 34 dogs with an ultrasound abnormality, the owners of 20 of them declined the recommended follow-up. The study could not find out what the findings meant because most people did not want to know.

In the ones who did pursue it, screening changed what happened. Four dogs had a urinary tract infection nobody had suspected and were treated for it. One turned out to have early kidney failure and was put on a diet and a monitoring plan. One had a carcinoma found in the testicles. The paper’s own conclusion is that “a number of clinically normal mature golden retriever dogs have occult but potentially significant disease” — a long way from the reading that screening just generates noise.

There is a real cost to looking, and it is smaller than it first appears

The obvious worry is the cascade: you find something incidental, and the dog ends up having surgery it never needed. A study of 105 dogs who had a spleen removed after an incidental, unruptured mass was found is the best test of that worry, and the result cuts both ways.

70.5% of the lesions were benign. Seventy-four dogs had a spleen removed for something that turned out not to be cancer. But 31 of them — 29.5% — did have malignant disease, most often haemangiosarcoma. And the authors’ conclusion was that for these dogs, benign and malignant alike, “life expectancy… that received prompt intervention was better than has previously been reported for other studied populations.”

Nearly three in ten of those incidental findings were the thing everybody is afraid of. That is not an argument against looking.

And some decline really is ageing

This part is true and worth holding onto. Hearing goes, as above. Muscle goes: healthy old Labradors had measurably less muscle along the spine than young ones, though that study had only nineteen dogs in it and only one of several measures reached significance. Colony beagles studied for activity rhythms took longer to get going after lights-on and had shorter bouts of activity with more rest during the day.

Two honest qualifications on that last one, both from the same abstract. Cognitively impaired aged dogs behaved differently again from unimpaired ones. And the age effect was “less prominent in dogs housed in an indoor/outdoor facility” — which is to say the environment changed how much the ageing showed.

That qualification runs through this whole section. A 2022 review of canine geriatric rehabilitation is often quoted for the phrase “inevitable detrimental age-related changes”. The full sentence is: “the concept of ‘optimal aging’, or ‘healthy aging’, has emerged in which inevitable detrimental age-related changes can be minimized or avoided at various levels of physical, mental, emotional, and social health.” The same review calls obesity, sarcopenia and a sedentary lifestyle “a trifecta of age-related morbidity common to both people and dogs” — and it names them because all three are things you can change.

So: some of it is ageing, less of it is fixed than the word “ageing” implies, and the honest summary is Sydney’s own, from the page quoted at the top of this article — “Regular health checks allow earlier detection of disease, which can improve comfort, quality of life, and long-term outcomes.”

What we take from all that

What follows is our own view, and we would sooner label it as one than dress it up as a finding. Old age explains nothing on its own, so the useful move is to get the separate things named — and then to make decisions about them with a vet, including decisions to leave something alone.

Compare two sentences. “He’s twelve and he’s slowed down.” And: “He’s twelve, his hips are sore, his teeth need doing, his heart sounds normal, and the vet and I have agreed to start on the hips and get the lumps sampled.” The second one is a set of decisions, and you can only reach it after somebody has examined the dog.

Which is why the order matters, and why the cheap part comes first:

The physical examination. Joints, mouth, chest, abdomen, skin, eyes, weight and muscle mass. One consultation fee, no equipment, and it is what found the arthritis, the murmurs, the dental disease and the lumps in the Ghent study. Note that the Ghent authors advised further work mostly on the strength of blood pressure, murmurs and laboratory results — so the examination is the start of the process rather than a substitute for the rest of it.
Your list. What changed and roughly when, written down, with a phone video if you can get one. “Stopped jumping onto the bed in about March” is worth more than “he’s slowed down”, and a ten-second clip of the dog standing up from its bed is worth more than both.
Then decide about tests, with a vet who has already examined the dog and can say which ones are likely to change anything. That conversation is a different thing from ticking a senior panel at reception. On lumps in particular, the Ghent authors advise sampling rather than watching: “cytology is advised because there is a good correlation between cytologic diagnosis and histologic diagnosis.”

The Sydney page’s answer to the other question owners ask — “My dog seems fine. Do we still need senior screening tests?” — is measured rather than absolute: “Often yes. Many conditions, such as early organ disease or hormonal disorders, can develop gradually and may not cause obvious signs at first.” Often. Not always.

What a senior check actually is

Owners get told to book one without ever being told what they are buying. Sydney’s teaching hospital sets it out: “a detailed history (appetite, thirst, toileting, activity, behaviour, and any changes at home) / weight, body condition score, and muscle condition assessment / a thorough physical examination (including teeth and gums, eyes, ears, skin, heart and lungs, abdomen, and joints) / discussion of diet, lifestyle, parasite prevention, and vaccination schedule”.

Beyond that, they say, “your veterinarian may recommend additional screening, such as: blood and urine screening tests / blood pressure measurement / other tests tailored to your dog”. Note the order. The history and the hands come first, and they are the part included in a consultation fee.

On how often, Sydney declines to give a number: “The most appropriate frequency depends on your dog’s health and any existing medical conditions.”

What this costs in Australia

Australian clinics set their own prices and very few publish them. The figures below are individual clinics’ own published lists, checked on 20 September 2026. They are not national averages, because nobody publishes one.

Consultation — $98.20 at Walkerville Vet in Adelaide; $135 at Pack and Clowder in Fremantle.
Blood screen — Walkerville lists an annual wellness blood test at $186.35, and a pre-anaesthetic test at $184.65 for a dog over seven against $137.55 for one under seven. Pack and Clowder lists illness screen blood work at $340.
Urine test — $39 in house at Walkerville. It was the only published Australian urinalysis price we could find.
X-rays with sedation, two views — $520 at Walkerville.
Dental — Walkerville lists a scale and polish at $640 for dogs up to 30 kg with no worse than grade 2 disease. Pack and Clowder lists dental x-rays and cleaning at $1,028, and with extractions at $1,400 to $2,285, capped at $3,065. An old dog’s mouth is rarely the cheap version.
Senior wellness package — Greencross, a national group, advertises a senior package of nurse assessment, veterinary consultation and a wellness blood screen as “Valued at $349 – now only $249”. The promotion on the page carries the line “Book and attend a wellness check appointment by 31 May 2026”, a deadline that had passed by the time we checked it on 20 September 2026 while the offer was still displayed, so ask what you will actually be charged. Note what is not in the package either way: no urinalysis, no blood pressure, no imaging.

One oddity worth naming. Sydney’s teaching hospital lists blood pressure measurement among the screening tests a vet may recommend for a senior dog. Neither Walkerville nor Pack and Clowder prices it as a line item, and Pack and Clowder lists it only as part of anaesthetic monitoring. It does get priced in Australia inside specialist bundles — Veterinary Specialists of Sydney lists a cardiology consultation with echocardiogram and blood pressure at $1,250 — but at the general-practice level it is recommended more often than it is costed, so ask what it adds.

The insurance clock nobody mentions

This is the most financially consequential part of the page, and almost no Australian owner knows it until it is too late.

Australian pet insurers close the door on new policies at an age, and the age is lower than most people assume. CHOICE’s comparison of 55 Australian pet insurance policies, checked on 20 September 2026, shows a maximum age for new cover of eight years on most of them, seven on some, nine on a few. A handful go much later — Trupanion is listed at 13 years, and one Guide Dogs product at no maximum age — so the door is not the same door everywhere, and an owner of a nine-year-old dog has fewer options rather than none.

Bow Wow Meow, one of the larger brands, puts it this way on its own site: “You can start your pet’s cover any time before the age of 9 years when you first apply. As long as we continue to provide the product, we’ll offer renewal of your policy every year for your pet’s life.” Pet Insurance Australia states the same threshold, though the two are less independent than they look: both are underwritten by PetSure. One underwriter’s rule, two brands.

Now the half that matters more, because it applies whatever your dog’s age. The same insurer defines a pre-existing condition as “any health condition (diagnosed or otherwise) that your pet has shown signs of before the purchase of a pet insurance policy” — note “or otherwise” — and then splits them. A temporary condition stops being an exclusion if the pet “hasn’t shown signs of that condition for 18 months or more”. A chronic one is different: “if your pet displays one of these conditions prior to the purchase of a pet insurance policy or its waiting period, it will never be coverable under the policy.” Their examples include cruciate ligament conditions, intervertebral disc disease, hip and elbow dysplasia, patella luxation, endocrine diseases and “any other chronic condition”.

Osteoarthritis is not named on that list. It plainly meets their own definition of a chronic condition — one that “requires ongoing care or is more prolonged in nature” — so an owner should assume it falls under the catch-all and ask the insurer directly rather than hoping.

Read that alongside everything above and the arithmetic is unpleasant. The stiffness you are calling old age is something the dog has “shown signs of”, whether or not anyone has written it down. And the entry age is running out at seven or eight for most insurers, not nine. If you are going to insure a dog at all, the time was earlier than this; if the dog is already past it, accident-only and older-pet products exist and are worth asking about rather than assuming there is nothing.

This site earns nothing from any insurer, any clinic or any product mentioned here, and there are no affiliate links on it.

The cheap things that help an old dog at home

None of this needs a diagnosis and all of it can start this afternoon.

Traction. Polished boards and tiles are the single most under-rated problem in an Australian house. A sore or weak dog that slips once becomes a dog that will not cross the kitchen. Runners, rubber-backed mats and yoga mats on the routes the dog actually uses.
Ramps and steps for the car, the couch and the bed, if the dog is still trying to get up there. The jump down does more damage than the jump up.
Bedding with support, off the cold hard floor, and out of the draught.
Raised food and water bowls, which a peer-reviewed review of non-drug management for arthritic dogs recommends and which almost nobody does.
Nails short. Long nails change how a dog stands, and an old dog that walks less wears them down less.
Keep it moving. Shorter and more often beats one long walk on the weekend. The 2022 rehabilitation review’s whole argument is that muscle loss and a sedentary life are among the modifiable parts of ageing.
Weight. The single most effective free intervention available to you.

The two changes people ring the vet about too late

Night waking. A dog pacing, panting or crying at two in the morning is the change most likely to exhaust a household to the point of a decision. It has a long differential — pain that shows up once the dog lies still, cognitive dysfunction, full bladder, breathlessness from heart disease, deafness and disorientation — and several of those are treatable. Say so specifically when you ring rather than describing it as restlessness.

Incontinence. Wetting the bed is not a normal part of getting old and it has its own list of causes, several of which respond to treatment. It is also, with night waking, one of the two things that most often ends an old dog’s life for reasons that had nothing to do with how the dog felt.

Quality of life, and the conversation nobody starts early enough

This page is about not writing a dog off. The other half of that is knowing when the answer really is that the dog has come to the end, and being able to see the difference.

Andrew Spanner’s framing is the most useful we have read from an Australian vet, and it is a set of questions rather than a score: “Do they have more good days than bad days? Do they still have quality of life?” and “Is your pet still doing the things they love? If you pick up a toy, a lead or a treat, do they still show interest?” On timing he is direct: “It’s better to go a little early than to go too late and risk increasing the suffering.” And on the conditions this article is about: “For many debilitating diseases such as arthritis or cognitive deterioration, there is no right time.”

Those are questions to ask yourself weekly and to answer honestly with your own vet, who knows your dog. They are not something a web page can score for you, and this one will not try.

The four things not to do

Do not reach for the human medicine cabinet

Paracetamol, ibuprofen and aspirin are not safe substitutes for a veterinary anti-inflammatory, and a dose that a person would not notice can hurt a small dog. Dogs also need bloods checked before and during long-term anti-inflammatory use, which is the step owners buying online do not get.

Do not start a joint supplement and call it treatment

RSPCA Australia is direct about this: “There are many ‘joint supplements’ on the market but many of these lack robust evidence to support their use, and they should not be used as a substitute for conventional treatments.” We have gone through the trials in detail on our page about glucosamine and chondroitin.

Do not decide on the basis of how the dog looks when you are watching

This is the trap the whole page turns on. A sore dog distracted by a visitor looks like a well dog. In a study of 62 dogs with osteoarthritis wearing activity monitors, “no statistical relationship was found” between the owners’ questionnaire scores and the dogs’ daily activity counts — and over the test period the owners’ pain scores drifted downwards in a way the authors put down to a caregiver placebo effect. Film the dog instead. A phone video of your dog getting off its bed, taken the same way each month, beats anyone’s memory.

Do not assume weakness and stiffness are the same problem

A dog that is stiff and sore moves less because it hurts. A dog that is weak cannot hold itself up, and that is a shorter list with more urgent items on it, including paralysis tick. We have set out how to tell them apart on our page about a limping dog, and the tick side on our paralysis tick page. Tick paralysis is not a disease of old dogs — in a prospective Australian study of 506 cases the median age was 5.4 years — but an old dog is the one most likely to have its early signs put down to age.

One more thing, if the change was behavioural

If your older dog has become frightened of storms or fireworks when it never used to be, or if a noise fear has spread from the noise itself to the place where it happened, pain is worth raising with your vet. The evidence for that link is thin and we have set out how thin on our page about fireworks and storms. It is still a cheap thing to check in a dog you were already going to have examined.

The short version

The University of Sydney’s own senior dog page opens with “Ageing is not a disease, but it is associated with gradual changes in body systems”, and answers “my dog is slowing down, is that just ageing?” with a recommendation to get the dog checked.
Of 98 older dogs whose owners believed them healthy, orthopaedic examination was normal in 36. Thirty-nine were overweight, 22 had a heart murmur, 21 had severe dental calculus.
In a Sydney-led survey, estimated cognitive dysfunction ran at 14.2% against 1.9% carrying a veterinary diagnosis of it. An Adelaide vet argues the opposite risk — that dementia gets over-called and hides treatable disease. Both point to the same fix.
Look hard at a healthy old dog and you will find something — 54.7% on bloods and 64.2% on ultrasound in one study of 53 clinically normal dogs, which the authors call “occult but potentially significant disease”. Most of those owners declined the follow-up, so what it all meant is still unknown. Of 105 incidentally found splenic masses removed, 70.5% were benign and 29.5% were cancer.
So the goal is to get things named. Physical examination first, your written list and a phone video second, tests third and chosen with a vet who has already examined the dog.
Some of it really is ageing. Hearing goes, muscle goes, aged dogs take longer to get going. Knowing which part is which is the entire point.
Arthritis hides because it stops when the dog is distracted, which is whenever you are looking.
In Australia, a consultation runs around $100 to $135 at the clinics that publish prices, two-view x-rays with sedation $520, and a dental with extractions $1,400 to $2,285. Very few clinics publish anything at all, and blood pressure is recommended far more often than it is costed.
Most Australian insurers will not start a new policy after a dog turns eight, a few go to nine and a couple much later — and whatever the age, a chronic condition your dog has already shown signs of “will never be coverable” with that insurer.
Traction, ramps, supportive bedding, short nails and weight need no diagnosis and can start today. Slippery floors are the most under-rated problem in an Australian house.
Night waking and incontinence are not normal ageing, they have treatable causes, and they are the two changes most likely to end a dog’s life for reasons that were never really about the dog.
Laryngeal paralysis is the sleeper — an older Labrador, noisy breathing, tires early, average presentation age 9.9 years in the Australian series, and 87.7% of owners reported a better quality of life after it was treated.

Sources

This page is general information, not veterinary advice, and it cannot tell you what is wrong with your dog or what to give it. Working out which part of a change is ageing and which part is disease needs a veterinarian who has examined the animal. If your dog has become weak or wobbly over days rather than months, ring your vet or your nearest emergency animal hospital straight away.

Old Dog Slowing Down – What That Usually Turns Out to Be