Untitled

logo

Replace

Edit

Veterinarian Of 16 Years:

The One Thing I Wish Every Big Breed Owner Did Before Their Dog Turned Four

German Shepherds. Labs. Goldens. Rottweilers. Their Own Bodies Turn On Their Joints Years Before The First Limp.

4.7 stars | 48,000+ dogs

By Dr. Christine Colamonico, DVM

Last Updated 16, July 2026

Hi. My name is Dr. Christine Colamonico and I am a Veterinarian.

Between the exam room and the letters that reach my desk, I have now heard from owners in more than 48,000 American homes about what is happening to their dogs.

Throughout my career I have seen dogs come in with every kind of joint problem.

Dogs who could no longer get up off a kitchen floor

You name it.

I have seen it all.

From a dog who hesitates half a second at the car door. To a dog whose family bought a ramp. To this:

And then it is an dog momcarrying a seventy pound dog into the garden so he can go to the toilet

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 owners 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 wear and tear

What if I told you the damage in your dog's hips is not his joints wearing out at all?

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.

Which sheds more flecks. Which brings more of the same.

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.

Replace

Edit

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.

More pressure, on less of him, for longer.

Then there is the third reason, and it is why these four are on the same page.

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 as dysplastic. 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 owners 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.

So what stops the friendly fire?

Ask most people and they will tell you to keep an eye on him and deal with it when it shows up.

And I understand why. At two there is nothing to find. He walks normally, plays normally, passes his
exam. Nobody sedates a happy young dog to x ray every joint on the off chance, and honestly they
should not.

But that is how you end up watching, properly and carefully, for six years, while the thing you are
watching for finishes what it started.

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 UCII.

Ordinary collagen gets broken apart in the stomach. UCII survives it. So it arrives at his immune system
whole and recognisable, in a small daily amount, over and over.

And his immune system learns. That is not damage. That is him. Stand down.

It calls off the fire instead of restocking the bricks.

Put head to head against glucosamine and chondroitin in a university trial, dogs on UCII put more
weight through the sore leg and moved better.

The problem was that almost nobody was building a dog chew around it at a proper daily dose.

Which is where Jeremy comes in. Dr. Jeremy Adjovi Boco. We met in vet school and we had been having
the same conversation for years, in two different practices, about owners who did everything right and
still ended up with a seven year old who could not manage the stairs.

So we built the thing we kept wishing they had started at two.

Introducing Jope Hip And Joint Chews

Replace

Edit

UCII 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. I
am not going to claim more than that for it.

Three things. Short list on purpose.

✔

Made by two working vets, not a marketing team with a factory contract.

✔

Over 85 studies behind the three ingredients.

✔

Cold pressed, so the heat of manufacturing does not wreck them.

✔

Made in the USA and third party tested every batch.

✔

A supplement your dog spits out is not a supplement. He takes this one.

Under 25 lbs, one a day. 25 to 75 lbs, two. Over 75 lbs, three. A grown Shepherd, Lab, Golden or
Rottweiler is almost always on three.

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.

Start your dog on Jope

Free shipping. 90 day money back guarantee.

But do not take my word for it.

Jope is in more than 48,000 American homes and holds 4.7 stars across verified reviews. These are
owners who started before anything was wrong.

Picture him at eleven

Still going up in one motion.

Still at the door instead of lifting his head off the bed.

Still doing the whole walk, not the first half of it.

Nobody carrying anybody into the garden at two in the morning.

Replace

Edit

The honest problem with starting now You will not see it work.

There is no before and after when there was nothing wrong to start with. A customer called DeeDee
gave us three stars and put it better than I can.

Three stars. Fair enough. We left it up.

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

Click the green button. It takes you to our official site.

Pick the size that matches his weight, enter your details, and choose how many months you want.

Most owners take the three month supply, for three reasons.

✔

Three months is the length of the guarantee, so you get to judge it on a fair run.

✔

It is where the bigger changes tend to show up.

✔

The longer supplies cost less.

And if there is a second dog in the house, order for both. The message we get most after a first bag is
somebody asking whether the younger one should be on it too.

Start your dog on Jope today

Free shipping. 90 day guarantee. Pause or cancel anytime.

There is no risk in trying. There is one in waiting.

I know how this goes if you close the page. I have watched it from the other side of the table.

You will keep an eye on him, the way you were told to. Nothing will change for a while, and you will feel
reassured by that. Then one Tuesday he will stop at the bumper, and you will say come on then, and
you will forget about it by lunchtime.

And the friendly fire will have had another four years.

I am not saying that to frighten you. I am saying it because the owners who write me the hardest emails
are never the ones who started too early. I have not had that email once. It is always some version of I
wish I had known at three.

And this was never only about him.

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

Free shipping. 90 day guarantee. Pause or cancel anytime.

Jope Hip & Joint Chews

Replace

Edit

4.7 stars

48,000+ dogs

➔ Start your dog on Jope

Free shipping. 90 day money back guarantee.

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.

SHOPPING CART

title