THE WEEKLY LETTER

Straight answers.
For your dog.

Research, welfare & life with dogs   /   Alexandra & Kona

Hey friend, it's Alexandra and Kona 👋

A little Kona update: we had to move her to a fresh food diet. Still a kibble lover forever. A change in what my own dog needs does not mean I have abandoned that entire position, so please do not revoke my membership.

This week’s product pick goes with that change: a lick mat. Sometimes the newsletter research and the very ordinary business of feeding my dog meet in the same place.

This week: three quick research reads on canine cognitive aging, a housing-policy update, Nicole and Dr. Daniel Toker on the podcast, and a few thoughts about the labels we give ourselves and our dogs.

RESEARCH · SEPTEMBER 29

Senior dogs do not all age at the same pace

TLDR: Researchers followed 92 dogs aged eight and older with cognitive tests and caregiver questionnaires every six months, finding overall decline with age but different trajectories between dogs. This observational study helps describe how aging varies; it does not tell us what causes those differences or prove that a treatment prevents decline.

RESEARCH · ACCEPTED SEPTEMBER 28

An early drug study, not a dementia cure

TLDR: A randomized, placebo-controlled study of 28 older beagles reported that octreotide improved performance across three cognitive testing tasks, with the main effects involving response speed and engagement. That small, short study does not establish lasting benefits or show that the drug treats dementia in pet dogs.

RESEARCH · JULY–AUGUST 2026

A blood test for canine dementia is still a work in progress

TLDR: A systematic review found promising signals in blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and brain imaging, but no validated biomarker that can diagnose canine cognitive dysfunction in a living dog. Some markers, including neurofilament light chain, warrant more study; a promising association is not yet a reliable clinical test.

ADVOCACY · HOUSING

Breed restrictions are a housing policy choice

TLDR: DC’s Pets in Housing legislation prohibits breed-, size-, and weight-based tenancy restrictions and differential pet charges for residential leases beginning after October 1, 2026. This is a protection for renters with pets, not a requirement that every rental property allow animals.

Helping animals, from the shelter
to the neuroscience lab

Out now. What does helping animals look like inside a shelter, online, and in a neuroscience lab? This week, animal advocate Nicole and neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Toker join me to talk about the different ways they put their shared values into practice.

Nicole talks fostering, volunteering, her work with Social Compassion in Legislation, and why “kill” versus “no-kill” labels can make shelter conversations harder. Daniel explains brain organoids, studying consciousness, and research methods that could reduce reliance on animal experiments.

We also get into celebrity pet purchases, scientific paywalls, and supporting each other through the emotional weight of animal advocacy. Plus a newly official foster fail and hamsters with excellent names. There is range here.

05   —   YA GIRL HAS SO MANY THOUGHTS

On Labels,
Both and Neither

I'm mixed race, which means I've spent my whole life pretty comfortable in ambiguity. As a kid though, that ambiguity was hard. I wanted to be one thing, either fully white passing or fully Asian, because having a foot in both felt like having a claim to neither.

Ironically, some of the people who made me feel like I wasn't "Asian enough" to count were other Asian girls, and that gave me a real case of imposter syndrome. For a while I leaned all the way into abandoning that part of myself. I'm not proud of that chapter, and I'm proud of where I landed instead.

(I promise this is going somewhere dog related. Stay with me.)

What I've come around to is that I can be two things, and also neither, all at once. I'm Irish and Filipino, but I'm not Catholic. I am, provably, bad at karaoke. I am, however, excellent at yelling at men, so we take our wins where we find them.

Even a diagnosis, like getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult woman, became less of an identity and more of a lens. It helped me understand my own patterns without becoming the whole story of who I am. I've also noticed I'm not really "like" my parents or my blood relatives in the ways I expected to be. There's a real gap there, and I've stopped needing to close it.

We give humans this grace all the time: you can hold multiple identifiers and still be your own individual case, separate from what any of those labels predict about you. We almost never extend that same grace to dogs.

That gap is worth sitting with. I was at dinner recently when someone confidently claimed a certain ethnicity was more "prone" to a certain type of crime. Setting aside how that statement aged in real time, I've actually been a victim of the exact crime he was describing, and my offender didn't match his theory at all. When I told him that sexual violence is often committed by someone the victim already knows, he didn't believe me. But the data backs it up. He wanted an identifier to blame because it's easier than sitting with how complicated people actually are. CDC’s overview of sexual violence.

This is exactly what happens when we only look at a dog's breed instead of the dog in front of us. A 2022 study in Science genotyped 2,155 dogs and surveyed owners of 18,385 dogs, and found that breed explains only about 9 percent of the variation in an individual dog's behavior. For the study's measure of how easily a dog is provoked by frightening, uncomfortable, or annoying stimuli, breed was almost useless as a predictor. Breed tells us something, but it doesn't tell us everything about the individual dog. Read the researchers’ summary.

My own dog is supposedly a mix of three different large breeds. She is, in practice, a small little thing who doesn't match any of them, physically or behaviorally. She's not the sum of a breed I was hoping for. She's the sum of everything she's actually lived, and she's the individual I'd do anything for.

06   —   THIS WEEK ON INSTAGRAM

A breed label is not
the whole dog.

More on the labels we give dogs, this time in video form. I talk about visual breed guesses, DNA results, and how breed labels shape the way we see the dog in front of us.

07   —   PRODUCTS I LOVE

Fresh food, same dog.
Enter the lick mat.

With Kona’s move to fresh food, this week’s pick is the LUKITO lick mat linked below. A little feeding accessory for the new routine.

And yes, still a kibble lover forever. Feeding the dog in front of you means making room for what that particular dog needs. Kona gets her own individual case, too.

THE PODCAST

Got a question?

Ask Beth and Kent about dogs, research, rescue, or anything in between. Send us what’s on your mind for the podcast.

That's the roundup. Thanks for being here.

Go tell your dog something nice.

Until next week,

Alexandra & Kona 🐾