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Do Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese Have Dogs?

By mChip.org Staff Last updated August 17, 2026

Both stars have put a dog on a signature sneaker. One was a golden retriever who passed away; the other is a small terrier who just turned three. Very different sized dogs, and we take a look at how size affects longevity.

The Indiana Fever beat the Atlanta Dream 95–91 in overtime on Sunday night in Atlanta — Caitlin Clark with 26 points and 9 assists, Angel Reese with 15 points and 14 rebounds — and by Monday morning "caitlin clark angel reese matchup" was the most-searched thing in the country. (CBS Sports has the recap and Bleacher Report has the box score; Reese has played for Atlanta since the Sky traded her in April.)

Both stars have owned dogs. Caitlin Clark had a golden retriever who passed away, and Angel Reese has a small terrier who just turned three. These dogs are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to size, and we'll take a look at how size affects longevity in dogs.

Caitlin Clark: Bella, a golden retriever

Clark's family dog was a golden retriever named Bella — "my childhood dog that I grew up with," as Clark described her, an Iowa dog rather than one who moved to Indianapolis with her.

In June 2025, Clark debuted a custom Nike Kobe 6 Protro nicknamed "The Bellas": golden upper, pink tongue, and Bella's photo printed on the sockliner. Clark's own explanation of the design is better than any summary of it — "the tongue of the shoe was pink, for a golden retriever" — and she noted that "a lot of my teammates thought it was like some random graphic I found on the internet, but it was actually my dog."

Bella died on November 29, 2025. Clark posted two photos, one of a puppy and one recent, with the caption "not much changed in 9 years" and "we are gonna miss you puppy." Sports Illustrated covered it at the time.

Angel Reese: Tiago King

Reese's dog is Tiago King Reese — adopted while she was at LSU in 2023, with a birthday of June 6, which makes him three this summer. He has his own Instagram account, which had five figures of followers back in 2024, and he has climbed on at least one Louis Vuitton bag on camera.

Reese, like Clark, put her dog on a shoe: Reebok released an all-over mustard-yellow "Tiago King Reese" colorway of the Angel Reese 1 in November 2025. As Reese put it: "I find inspiration everywhere, and I knew I had to create a colorway in honor of my baby boy, Tiago — the dog who brings me so much love and joy."

His breed is less settled than the internet suggests. Complex calls him a Yorkie; other outlets say only "terrier"; Reese has not confirmed it publicly. Call him a small terrier and leave it there. (You'll also see "Thiago" — his own account spells it Tiago.)

The interesting analysis: those two dogs are at opposite ends of a curve

A ~70 lb golden retriever and a roughly 13 lb terrier are not the same animal on a longevity chart, and the gap is bigger and stranger than most owners realize.

Across mammal species, bigger animals live longer. Within dogs, it inverts. When Kraus, Pavard and Promislow took apart the numbers for The American Naturalist across 74 breeds, they found that large dogs die young mainly because they age faster — not because they start aging earlier, and not because their baseline mortality is higher.

The best modern population data comes from the UK, where McMillan and colleagues analyzed 584,734 dogs across 155 breeds for Scientific Reports in 2024. Median life expectancy across all of them was 12.5 years. A sample:

Breed Median life expectancy
Lancashire Heeler 15.4 years
Poodle 14.0
Yorkshire Terrier 13.3
Jack Russell Terrier 13.3
Golden Retriever 13.2
Labrador Retriever 13.1
Pug 11.6
French Bulldog 9.8
Cane Corso 8.1
Caucasian Shepherd Dog 5.4

Two honest caveats before anyone screenshots that table. First, the small-versus-large gap in the study's broad categories is modest — 12.7 years for small breeds against 11.9 for large. The dramatic numbers live at the giant end and in flat-faced breeds, where a short muzzle carries roughly a 40% increased risk of shorter life. Second, all of this is UK data. There is no American dataset of comparable quality, and figures move a lot with methodology — a 2022 VetCompass life-table study put French bulldogs at 4.5 years, a number that reflects a rapidly expanding breed population with very few old dogs as much as it reflects biology.

Was nine young for Bella?

Against a 13.2-year median: yes, by about four years — roughly 30% of an expected life.

Against the Golden Retriever Club of America's own owner surveys, which put average lifespans at 10.7 years for males and 11.3 for females, nine is below average but inside the normal range. The GRCA's distribution is the most intuitive framing: of 1,511 deceased goldens reported, 1,026 reached ten or more and 503 did not. Roughly a third didn't make it to ten. (The GRCA is careful to say this "was not a scientific survey" and that owners of sick dogs are likelier to respond.)

There's a third number that complicates both. At UC Davis's veterinary teaching hospital, the median age at death among 652 golden retrievers was 9.15 years. That is not the breed's life expectancy — dogs who reach a referral hospital are sicker and younger than the breed at large — but it does mean nine is simultaneously "young" against the population and "typical" among goldens who die of disease.

For what it's worth on life stages: AAHA doesn't publish a senior-age chart for dogs. Its 2023 senior care guidelines define senior as the last 25% of estimated lifespan, and state explicitly that "there is no specific age for senior status." Apply that rule to a 13.2-year median and a golden becomes senior around 9 or 10 — meaning Bella was entering her senior years, not finishing them.

The cancer number, handled carefully

You will read everywhere that about 60% of golden retrievers die of cancer. The figure is probably in the right neighborhood, but it deserves better provenance than it usually gets.

The GRCA states it on its own site without citing a source. Trace it back and you land on a 1998 breed-club health survey — voluntary, owner-reported, self-selected, and now nearly thirty years old.

Peer-reviewed work supports the general picture more defensibly. In that UC Davis cohort, 65% of golden retriever deaths (424 of 652) were cancer-related. And a 2011 JVIM study of 74,556 dogs across 82 breeds found that golden retrievers had the highest percentage of cancer deaths of any breed studied — with large dogs generally dying more of cancer and small dogs more of endocrine and metabolic disease.

One nuance that gets mangled constantly: in the UC Davis data, 66.5% of spayed females died of cancer versus 41.4% of intact females — but intact females also died far younger overall, and the authors concluded that age was a stronger predictor than reproductive status. Dogs who live longer live long enough to get cancer. That is not the same as spaying causing it.

Hemangiosarcoma is why "she was fine, and then she wasn't"

Hemangiosarcoma arises in the lining of blood vessels, usually in the spleen or heart. The Morris Animal Foundation describes it as almost universally fatal, and it accounts for roughly 70% of the cancer deaths in its golden retriever study cohort. The 1998 GRCA survey put it at 18.7% of all golden retriever deaths — nearly one in five — at an average age of 10.3 years. Prognosis is grim: untreated visceral cases can go from apparently healthy to death in days to weeks; surgery plus chemotherapy extends median survival to a little over five months.

The reason it matters practically is the presentation. Because the tumor bleeds internally, the first sign is often not a lump or a limp — it's sudden weakness, pale gums, a swollen abdomen, or collapse. That is an emergency-room trip, not a wait-and-see-till-Monday. Cutaneous hemangiosarcoma, on the skin, is a much better story and can often be cured with wide excision.

Lymphoma comes with its own twist. A study of 1,529 canine lymphoma cases across eight European countries found golden retrievers only mildly predisposed in the UK and not at all elsewhere — while noting that goldens often make up more than 20% of American and Japanese lymphoma case series. The authors attribute the gap to genetic divergence between American and European golden retriever lines, which differ physically and rarely interbreed. "Goldens get cancer" is, to a meaningful degree, an American golden retriever finding.

What's actually being done about it

The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study enrolled 3,044 goldens in 2012 and has followed them ever since. As of its April 2026 update: more than 650,000 biological samples, 1.6 million lab results and 1,700-plus confirmed cancer diagnoses. Cancer accounts for about 75% of deaths among the study dogs.

Recent findings include chromosomal regions associated with hemangiosarcoma risk, and a University of Wisconsin–Madison analysis that detected benzene, xylene and 1,3-butadiene in every dog sampled — with lymphoma-affected dogs showing significantly higher secondhand-smoke exposure. It's a single-breed cohort of volunteered North American dogs, so it can't tell you breed-wide incidence. It can tell you what to look at next.

If you have a golden — or any large dog

  • Learn the ten warning signs. Colorado State's Flint Animal Cancer Center lists them: swellings that persist or grow, sores that don't heal, weight loss, appetite loss, bleeding or discharge, offensive odor, difficulty eating or swallowing, loss of stamina, persistent lameness, and difficulty breathing, urinating or defecating.
  • Add the one that list misses. Sudden collapse, pale gums or a distended belly in a middle-aged golden is a hemangiosarcoma pattern until proven otherwise. Go now.
  • Learn to feel lymph nodes — under the jaw, in front of the shoulders, behind the knees. A monthly thirty-second check is the cheapest early-detection tool you own. Ask your vet to show you once.
  • Move senior bloodwork earlier than you think. AAHA recommends CBC, chemistry panel and urinalysis every 6 to 12 months for senior dogs. For a golden, that clock starts around eight or nine — not twelve.
  • Small dogs get a different list, not a free pass. In the Dog Aging Project's analysis of 27,541 dogs, dogs under 10 kg had an 11% lifetime prevalence of cardiac conditions against 2% in dogs over 40 kg, plus higher rates of eye, liver and respiratory disease. Tiago's risks are real; they're just not the same risks.

One last counterweight against fatalism, from the same UC Davis data: goldens who died of cancer were on average older at death (9.83 years) than those who died of everything else (6.93). Cancer is what tends to get the ones who make it.

This post is general information, not veterinary advice. If your dog is showing any of the signs described above, contact your veterinarian.

Sources

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