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A mixed-breed dog looking directly at the camera with an alert, curious expression

The 9 Percent: What Your Dog's Breed Actually Predicts

A landmark study of 18,000 dogs upended what we thought we knew about breed and behaviour. It turns out a label tells you surprisingly little about the dog in front of you.

A golden retriever gazing directly into the camera, its eyes warm and attentive

The Look That Made Us Family

When your dog meets your eyes, a chemical loop fires in both brains — the same oxytocin system that bonds a mother to her newborn. The science of a glance explains thirty thousand years of alliance.

A dog pressing its nose low to the ground on a sunlit path, actively scenting

A World Written in Smell

A dog's nose isn't a better version of ours — it is an entirely different way of reading the world, one that turns a single sniff into a story of time, distance, and recent memory.

A fluffy Siberian Husky with its tongue out, panting in warm weather

Bred for the Cold, Living on the Equator

Huskies, Samoyeds and Chow Chows are among Singapore's most-photographed dogs — and among its most physiologically challenged. What thermoregulation science tells us about the island's love of cold-climate breeds.

The human–animal bond

An empty dog bed beside a window, late afternoon light falling across the blanket

The Grief That Has No Name

Losing a dog can hurt as much as losing a person — sometimes more. And yet society offers almost no permission to grieve. Here is the science that explains why, and the case for taking pet loss seriously.

A dog lying comfortably on a bed with white linen, morning light through the window

How the Dog Got Into the Bed

A century ago the family dog slept in the yard. Today it sleeps on the duvet. The story of how that happened is a story about what we decided we needed from animals — and from each other.

A golden retriever looking up at its owner with an expression of rapt attention and affection

The Friendliest Gene

Dogs may carry a genetic signature of extreme sociability — a canine echo of a rare human condition in which strangers feel, immediately and overwhelmingly, like friends. New genomic research suggests the bond between dogs and humans is written into the genome itself.

Eleven Floors Up

In the world's densest public housing, where a single approved dog shares 90 square metres with an entire family, the human-animal bond is lived differently. What it really means to love a dog in an HDB flat.

Longevity & ageing

An elderly golden retriever lying peacefully in a sunlit garden, greying muzzle resting on its paws

The Pill That Wants to Give Your Dog More Years

In February 2025, a US regulator said something extraordinary about a drug for dogs: that it was reasonably likely to slow ageing. Here is the science, the hope, and the honest caveats.

An elderly grey-muzzled dog resting peacefully in soft light, eyes calm and wise

50,000 Dogs and the Search for the Reason They Age

The Dog Aging Project is the largest longitudinal study of ageing in any vertebrate species ever attempted. Its subject is the family dog. Its real quarry may be us.

An elderly grey-muzzled dog lying on a soft blanket in warm afternoon light

The Last Good Year

Modern veterinary medicine can keep an old dog alive longer than ever before — which makes the hardest question harder still: when is a life still a good one?

Growing Old in the Heat

A senior dog in Singapore faces the compounding pressures of age, a tropical climate, and a high-rise life. How the island's owners are rewriting the script on what end-of-life care looks like.

People & their pets

A veterinary examination table under bright clinical lights in an empty consulting room at night

The Last Vet on Call

Emergency veterinary medicine runs on love — the client's for their animal, and the vet's for their calling. What happens inside an emergency practice after midnight is a story about the cost of both.

A rescued dog resting in a volunteer’s arms, looking up with cautious trust

The People Who Won't Stop

Every week, someone in a rescue network says yes one more time — to another dog, another litter, another case no one else will take. The science of what drives them, and what it costs.

A person sitting on a city pavement with a dog resting its head on their lap, both looking into the distance

A Dog at the End of the Leash

For people experiencing homelessness, a dog is family, security, and the last loyal thing. It is also, too often, the reason a shelter turns them away.

The Woman Who Counts the Strays

Before the city wakes, Singapore's community dog feeders and rescue volunteers are already out — documenting, feeding, and quietly holding the welfare net together for dogs that belong, officially, to no one. A portrait of the people behind the Singapore Special.

Rescue, welfare & ethics

A French Bulldog sitting in bright light, its flat face and large eyes prominent

The Price of a Cute Face

We bred dogs to look like babies — short noses, big eyes, rounded skulls — and gave them lungs that can't breathe. The brachycephalic welfare crisis is hiding in plain sight behind a viral aesthetic.

A line of pedigree dogs of different breeds at a dog show, handlers at their sides

Purebred

The pedigree dog was a Victorian invention. A century and a half later, the closed studbook — its defining rule — is colliding with the genetics of health. What happens when a tradition becomes a liability?

A dog peering through the wire mesh of a kennel door in a shelter, ears alert

Adopt, Don't Shop — But It's Complicated

The slogan is everywhere. The reality of shelter intake, return rates, breed bans, and "no-kill" mathematics is messier — and more interesting — than any four words can hold.

The Dog That Belongs to No One

The Singapore Special isn't a breed — it's the island's own dog, forged from centuries of tropical survival and now finding its way, dog by dog, into HDB living rooms. How a street animal became a symbol.