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Veterinarian Of 16 Years:
The one thing I wish every big breed parent did before their dog turned four
German Shepherds. Labs. Goldens. Rottweilers. Their Own Bodies Turn On Their Joints Years Before The First Limp. Read this before you do anything else.
4.7 stars | 48,000+ dogs who switched
By Dr. Christine Colamonico, DVM
Last Updated 16, July 2026
Hi. My name is Dr. Christine Colamonico and I am a Veterinarian.
The letters that reach my desk come from parents in more than 48,000 American homes who have made the switch, and they tell me what is happening to their dogs.
Throughout my career I have seen dogs come in with every kind of joint problem.
Dogs who slow down on the second half of the walk.
Dogs who stop taking the stairs.
Dogs who cannot get up off a kitchen floor without help.
You name it.
From a dog who hesitates half a second at the car door. To a dog whose family bought a ramp.
And then it is a dog mom carrying a seventy pound dog out to the yard so he can go to the bathroom
I have watched people do that. In the rain. At two in the morning. Without a word of complaint, because they love him.
And every one of them said some version of the same thing to me.
He was fine last year.
For most of my career I thought I understood this. Cartilage wears out. Big dogs wear it out faster. Manage it when it shows up.
Then I read the research on young dogs.
Researchers X rayed two hundred dogs who were not limping. Walking fine. Nothing to report to anybody.
Most of them had joint damage anyway.
Not old dogs. Not sick dogs. Ordinary dogs whose parents would have told you there was nothing wrong.
Which meant the thing vets started treating at nine had been running since two, and nobody in the room had known.
The real cause is not only wear and tear
What if I told you the damage in your dog's hips is not his joints wearing out?
What if it is his body doing it to him?
It sounds mad. It is true, and it has a name we use in practice.
Friendly fire
Cartilage under pressure sheds tiny flecks of itself into the joint. Too small to see, too small to feel.
His immune system finds those flecks and does not recognise them. It reads them as something that should not be in there. So it goes after the cartilage they came off.
Round and round, every single day, from about the time he stops being a puppy.
His body is not wearing out. It is shooting at itself, and it has the wrong target.
Now here is the bad news if you own one of these four.
Your dog sheds more of those flecks than most, and he starts earlier. Same two reasons in all four breeds.
His hip sits looser in its socket, so his weight lands on a small patch of cartilage instead of spreading over the whole surface. And he went from a couple of pounds to seventy in a year, which means his bones finished growing before the soft tissue holding them together caught up.
Every one of them was bred not to quit.
A Shepherd was bred to work a full day and then keep working. A Labrador was bred to go back into freezing water again and again because you asked him to. A Rottweiler drove cattle over the Alps and hauled the butcher’s cart home afterwards. A Golden was bred to be the dog who never says no to anybody.
So when it starts to go, he does the only thing he knows. He carries on.
None of that is a fault and there is nothing to fix. It is what these dogs are, and it is most of why you love him.
It is also why the hip registry grades roughly one in five screened Shepherds, Goldens and Rottweilers with problems. Labradors do better, about one in eight. And on elbows the Rottweiler is worse than any breed on the register, with more than a third of screened dogs affected.
And in German Shepherds, vets in Britain who went back through the records found more of them were lost to their joints and bones than to cancer.
More than cancer.
This is why the bag from the pet shop does nothing
Almost every joint chew on that shelf runs on one idea. Cartilage is wearing out, so feed him more of
what cartilage is made of. That is glucosamine and chondroitin, and it is most of the aisle.
Tidy idea. Wrong problem
You can hand a builder bricks all day. It does nothing about the man pulling the wall down.
Which is why parents write to me saying they gave a joint chew every morning for six years and never
saw a thing. They were not careless. They were sold the wrong idea.
There is a better way to spend those six years.
Teaching his body to stand down, in under ten seconds a day
There is a way to tell an immune system it has the wrong target. It is called oral tolerance, and it is not
new. It is how the body learns that food is food and not an invader.
It works with a specific kind of collagen called UC-II®.
Ordinary collagen gets broken apart in the stomach. UC-II® survives it. So it arrives at his immune system whole and recognisable, in a small daily amount, over and over.
It calls off the fire instead of restocking the bricks.
Put head to head against glucosamine and chondroitin in a university trial, dogs on UC-II® put more weight through the sore leg and moved better.
Which is where Dr. Jeremy comes in. We met in vet school and we had been having
the same conversation for years, in two different practices, about parents who did everything right and still ended up with a seven year old who could not manage the stairs.
Introducing Jope Hip And Joint Chews
UC-II® to call off the friendly fire. Omega 3 from anchovy oil, which has more evidence behind it in dogs
than anything else in the category. And curcumin, which we include for what it does in the laboratory and in real life as one of the best antioxidants from plants.
I am not going to claim more than that for it.
✔
If there is an older dog in the house too, same chew, same rule by weight. It does its best work started
early and it does plenty of good started late.
Jope has helped more than 48,000 dogs who made the switch, with a 4.7-star rating across verified reviews. These are parents who started before anything was wrong.
Still going up in one motion.
The honest problem with starting now. You will not see it work.
That is the bargain with prevention, in dogs and in people. You never get the moment. You get a ten
year old who still takes the stairs two at a time, and no way of knowing what he would have been
otherwise.
Here is what to do next
Most parents take the three month supply, for three reasons.
There is no risk in trying. There is one in waiting.
It is about the kids who want him on the walk. It is about the years at the other end, the ones where he
is grey around the muzzle and still shoving his head under your hand at the door.
That is what is being decided right now, while he is two and flying and nothing is wrong.
He is fine today.
That is the whole reason to start.
Start your dog on Jope today
48,000+ dogs who switched
Start your dog on Jope
Recently started my 13 year old Akita on Jope and you can see the results right away. I see a lot of people saying their dog doesn't like the flavor which is the same for mine but I crumble it up into her food and it blends in fine. You won't regret getting this for your dog if they are hurting, mine are family and there isn't anything I wouldn't do to help them and this is one product I'm grateful to have found.
My golden retriever loves it and ive seen him much more active. My Australian shepherd wont touch it though. It’s expensive but less expensive than surgery.
I have had Sydney since she was only a few weeks old. Syd just turned 13. On June 2nd of this year, Syd literally stopped walking while we visited a forest preserve in Oak Brook, IL. Fortunately the preserve has a restaurant and a support staff willing to help me pick up Syd (a 70 lb dog), load her onto a motorized cart and take her to my car. I took her to my vet who after examining her noted that her left back leg had possibly a torn tendon suggesting that prior to a surgery, I try a rehab veterinary center. I did that and Syd got enough mobility to do her daily constitutional but little else. I then heard about JOPE, ordered it and started to include it in her food. Now she is back taking a walk with my other pup SAGE and again enjoying a chance to meet other canines at her favorite place, THE DOG PARK.
Ever since our labs have started taking Jope, our 6 year old lab has started to act like her age. She’s more active and limping less. We were concerned about hip dysplasia and there was none. Jope has made a huge difference in her health.
Jope has saved our almost 11 year old sweet Boxer boy! . I stumbled on a testimonial ad for Jope. After research I decided to try it and within 3 weeks we saw noticeable improvement. The stiffness and whimpers in the morning were gone. 4 has been on Jope done November 2025 and hasn’t missed a day. Jope will be a consist staple in 4’s life.
Disclaimer:
Jope is a dietary supplement for companion animals and is not a substitute for a balanced diet. Follow the recommendations on petjope.com and the dosages advised. If your pet is on medication or suffers from a medical condition, consult a veterinarian. If your pet shows unusual symptoms while using Jope, contact customer care. If symptoms persist or you are in doubt, stop using the product and consult your veterinarian. This article is an advertorial written by veterinarians at Jope.
