After saying goodbye to her dog Barbara, Kristen Bell is encouraging potential pet parents to consider adopting senior dogs.Bell and her family took care of Barbara for two years after adopting her from The Dog Cafe in Los Angeles.

Getty ImagesResearchers have created a better way of determining how to compare the ages of people and their four-legged friends .Trending stories,celebrity news and all the best of TODAY.“Since the two species don’t age at the same rate over their lifespans, it turns out it’s not a perfectly linear comparison, as the 1:7 years rule-of-thumb would suggest,” reads a press release on the study.

There were also various other tasks looked at in the journal of Learning & Behaviour, such as releasing food with a string and being able to recognise human faces.