Guinness must rule on whether he should keep or be stripped of his world record. I’m touched by the formal, goofy dignity of it all
In October, a dog died in Portugal. A common occurence. Except that this dog, Bobi, had taken longer to die than any other dog in recorded history. At 31 years and five months old, Bobi was, according to the world’s foremost keeper of this kind of knowledge, Guinness World Records, the oldest dog of all time.
Or was he? In human years, Bobi would have been near-mythically old at about 200. His supposed age defies what science thinks it knows about dogs. When Bobi died, he had reached more than double the usual life expectancy of his breed, a Rafeiro do Alentejo. Suspicion has mounted. Pictures of Bobi in the late 90s seem to show a dog with different coloured paws to the one that died in October. An investigation by Wired found that the Portuguese government database for dog registration did not have any registration information or data to confirm his age. Bobi’s owner’s claim that the dog was born in 1992 is, as yet, not sufficiently substantiated. His record has now attracted enough scrutiny for GWR to launch a “formal review” into Bobi this week.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist