Purina and Senior Dog Veterinary Society Collaborate to Advance Nutrition Care for Aging Dogs

More than half of dog-owning households in the United States are now sharing a home with a senior dog, a number that has climbed steadily over the past fifteen years. Purina and the Senior Dog Veterinary Society are betting that veterinary teams need more support catching up to that shift, and this week they announced a partnership built to do exactly that.

The core problem the partnership is targeting is a real gap in the field. There is no universally agreed definition of when a dog becomes a senior, and life expectancy swings widely by breed, size, genetics, and environment. Because of that variability, groups like AAFCO have never set specific nutritional requirements for the senior life stage, which leaves individualized, nutritionist-backed guidance as one of the only reliable tools practices actually have.

“Senior dogs are not simply adult dogs who have reached a certain birthday.” — Dr. RuthAnn Lobos, Senior Veterinarian, Purina

Dr. RuthAnn Lobos, senior veterinarian at Purina, points to the subtler side of aging as the real opportunity for practices, the muscle loss, mobility changes, cognitive shifts, and digestive changes that show up well before a dog looks obviously old. Catching those early is where nutrition earns its keep as a clinical tool rather than a side conversation at the end of an appointment.

On the delivery side, the partnership is built around continuing education rather than marketing collateral. Purina is providing RACE-approved nutrition webinars taught by board-certified veterinary nutritionists, open to Senior Dog Veterinary Society members and available more broadly to the profession. Each session qualifies for one hour of CE credit.

First webinar: Feeding the Healthy Senior Dog, Nutrition Strategies for Proactive Aging
Presented by Martha Cline, DVM, DACVIM (Nutrition)
Thursday, August 6, 2026 at 7 p.m. ET
One hour of RACE-approved CE credit

Monica Tarantino, DVM, co-founder of the Senior Dog Veterinary Society, frames the timing of aging itself as the reason this kind of structured support matters. Dogs, in her words, do not wake up one day and suddenly become old, they change gradually, and nutrition is one of the few consistent levers practices have through that entire process.

For practices, the practical upside here is less about a single webinar and more about what a partnership like this signals. Senior care has historically been treated as an extension of adult protocols with a few extra bloodwork panels added on. A dedicated certification pathway, backed by a research organization with a century of canine nutrition data behind it, gives teams an actual framework to build proactive senior wellness visits around, rather than reacting once a geriatric patient is already showing clinical decline.