THE DOG WHO STILL WANTS THE JOB: WHAT CHANGES IN A VETERAN, AND WHAT HELPS

BY MARC BRANNIGAN

The dog comes in the ring at nine or ten or twelve, grey through the muzzle, and the applause starts before the judge has looked at him. Everyone ringside knows what he was. He knows it too—he is entirely certain he is still the best dog in the building, and he is not interested in anyone’s opinion to the contrary.

Then he goes home, and he is slower getting out of the car than he was last year.

THE PART YOU CANNOT SEE

A study published in The Veterinary Journal in 2024 looked at radiographs of 1,873 dogs aged eight and older—nearly 6,300 joints across shoulders, elbows, hips, and stifles. Just over 40 percent of those joints showed some degree of osteoarthritis. Elbows were the worst at 57 percent.

The number that ought to stop you is a different one. Five hundred and thirty of those dogs—better than one in four—had come into the clinic for something unrelated to their joints. Their arthritis turned up on film taken for another reason entirely.

Their owners were not there about a limp. A great many of them did not know there was anything osteoarthritis-related to be there about.

Dogs are not stoic because they are brave. They are stoic because a dog who advertised weakness did not get to be anybody’s ancestor. Yours is running the same software.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

It is almost never a limp. A limp is late.

It is the dog who takes a beat before he rises, who has started using the furniture to get up. The one who still takes the stairs but thinks about them first. Who shortens his stride on the second day of a cluster and lengthens it again after a day off. Who used to sleep flat on his side and now sleeps curled, or on the cool floor instead of the bed. Who is a little slower to shake off after a bath.

Who is great for twenty minutes and then pays for it for two days.

The goal was never to make him young. It is to keep him comfortable enough, and strong enough, to go on being himself—to come out of the crate ready, to go around one more time, to take the applause he has coming.

Two things make this hard to see honestly. The first is that we watch our own dogs every day, and a change of a few percent per month is invisible at that resolution—it is the person who hasn’t seen him since the spring who notices. The second is that we judge by the good day. Everybody remembers the morning he tore around the yard like a two-year-old. Nobody counts the afternoons.

If you want an honest read, take thirty seconds of video of him walking directly away from you, once a season, on the same surface. You will see in October what you could not see in September.

WHY WAITING COSTS MORE THAN IT LOOKS

Here is the part that makes an old dog different from a sore young one.

Pain costs movement. A dog who hurts does less—fewer stairs, shorter walks, less of the standing and turning and bracing that ordinary days are made of. And the muscle that was holding that joint together is maintained by exactly the work he has stopped doing.

So, the joint loses its support, which increases the load on the joint, which increases the pain, which costs more movement. Veterinary nutritionists describe it as a cycle, and it is the reason a veteran can seem to fall off a cliff in a single season when nothing acute has happened at all.

The practical consequence is simple. Doing something early is not about comfort for its own sake. It is about keeping him moving enough to hold onto the muscle that keeps him sound.

WHAT ACTUALLY HELPS

No oil, supplement, or injection will outrun a dog carrying four extra pounds. On an arthritic frame, weight is the single biggest lever anybody has, and it is free. It is also the one most of us are worst at, because an old dog who wants a biscuit is very persuasive.

Footing is next. A veteran who skates on tile will stop trying, and a runner from the bed to the door buys back more confidence than most supplements. Keep his nails short— long nails change how a dog loads his foot, and an old dog cannot afford that. Keep him warm. And keep him working in short regular sessions rather than one hard outing on Saturday, because the goal is to protect the muscle, and muscle answers to frequency.

Hemp belongs on that list too. I went through the evidence for it in the September 2026 issue rather than repeat it here—a ninety-day trial run with Colorado State University, a placebo-controlled one at Cornell, both pointing the same direction on osteoarthritis-related pain, with my own interest in the first one declared there.

What is worth adding for a veteran specifically is patience. Give it a fortnight before you decide anything, and watch for the right signal: In an old dog the change tends to show up as more movement rather than less limping. He offers the stairs. He gets up without the three-point turn. That is the thing to look for, and it is easy to miss if you are waiting for a limp to disappear.

WHY IT’S WORTH THE TROUBLE

A veteran is not a retired dog. He is the dog your line came from, and he is still here, and he still thinks he is the best thing in the ring.

The goal was never to make him young. It is to keep him comfortable enough, and strong enough, to go on being himself—to come out of the crate ready, to go around one more time, to take the applause he has coming.

Next issue: What “full spectrum” actually means, and why it is the least regulated phrase on the front of the bottle.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PLANT & PEDIGREE... WITH MARC BRANNIGAN

Marc Brannigan is co-founder of HempMy Pet. He was a founding partner of Los Sueños Farms, at the time, the largest outdoor cannabis farm in the United States and the subject of a 60 Minutes segment, and of CBDRx, among the first hemp operations in the country to earn USDA Certified Organic status. Through Colorado CBD Seed, he helped develop the Abacus cultivars, and supported agricultural research programs at the University of Florida and the University of Georgia. He co-founded HempMy Pet in 2016, whose oils have since been the subject of clinical research at Colorado State University and Tarleton State University.