On October 21, 2023, Bobi the dog died. As with most celebrity deaths, the press coverage was wall-to-wall, but Bobi’s demise wasn’t unexpected. At 31 years and 163 days (or 217 in “human” years), he was old. So old, in fact, that in February 2023 Bobi had been crowned the “oldest dog ever” by Guinness World Records, which is the authority when it comes to these kinds of things.
Or is it? Shortly after Bobi’s death, experts started raising questions about the Portuguese mastiff’s advanced years. “Not a single one of my veterinary colleagues believe Bobi was actually 31 years old,” veterinarian Danny Chambers told The Guardian. “For the Guinness Book of Records to maintain their credibility and authority in the eyes of the veterinary profession, they really need to publish some irrefutable evidence.”
The reputation of the world’s foremost Irish dry stout turned recordkeeper was on the line here. Someone needed to establish the truth about the oldest dog to ever have lived. That someone—it turned out—was me.
A quick email to Guinness World Records would clear this up, I thought. This is the organization that verified the fastest time to eat a banana with no hands (17.82 seconds) and the longest human tunnel traveled through by a skateboarding dog (30 pairs of legs). For more than 60 years, Guinness World Records has cataloged the stinkiest flowers, widest mouths, and largest chicken nuggets. It had the receipts for the world’s oldest horses, cats, flags, trees, headstanders, llamas (in captivity), customer complaints, working post offices, and road surfaces. Dating the world’s oldest dog would be child’s play.
“We’re aware of the questions surrounding the legitimacy of the record and are reviewing them,” wrote Alina Polianskaya, a public relations executive at Guinness World Records, in response to my first email asking for details about Bobi’s age verification. Polianskaya struck me as a patient person, so I asked what this review process might involve. I imagined agents in GWR-branded overalls swabbing a dog toy for Bobi’s DNA. Could she share any details about the review?
“I’ll come back to you when we have further info to share,” Polianskaya replied to my second email. Perhaps she thought a senior writer at WIRED would have better things to do than pursue the truth about the oldest dog in the world.
What Polianskaya may not have realized was that she was emailing a journalist with an extremely high tolerance for low-stakes stories, a reporter who had once enlisted a crew of stamp-collectors to track down a package of fraudulent false teeth sent to the suburbs of Manchester, England. “We won’t have anything further to share until the review has concluded,” read Polianskaya’s reply to my third email. She did not respond to my fourth.
Luckily, GWR had left a trail for me to follow. In its February 2023 post announcing Bobi as the world’s oldest living dog, it mentioned that Bobi’s age had been verified by SIAC—a Portuguese government database for the registration of cats, dogs, and, uh, ferrets.
“We are able to confirm that indeed a dog named Bobi was registered with SIAC on the 3rd of July, 2022,” Eurico Cabral, a coordinator at SIAC, told me. Case closed, I thought. Then Cabral dropped a bombshell.
“At the time, the animal’s holder declared that it had been born in 1992, but we have no registration or data that can confirm or deny this statement,” he wrote. Now this was intriguing. The GWR piece claimed that SIAC had verified Bobi’s age, but all the agency could confirm was that Bobi’s owner had told them that the dog was born in 1992. What’s more, Cabral wrote in another email, SIAC had never been contacted by GWR to verify the information.
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Cabral’s revelation had blown the case wide open, but it didn’t provide any definitive answers. Registration of dogs born before 2008 didn’t become mandatory in Portugal until October 2020, so it’s possible that Bobi really was born in 1992, but that his owner just didn’t have the paperwork to prove it. It was time to bring the big dogs in.
Enikő Kubinyi, an expert in dog longevity at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, isn’t entirely convinced that Bobi made it to 31. Accurately aging dogs is extremely difficult, she says. Veterinary records can be unreliable or nonexistent, dogs often move between owners, and it’s tricky to age a dog based on physical appearance alone. Sometimes dogs die at home, and their vet records are never updated, which means that Kubinyi occasionally comes across dogs that are listed as age 40 or older.
We have some pretty good data on how long most dogs live. Data from 12,039 dogs buried or cremated in Tokyo between 2012 and 2015 found that mutts tend to have the highest life expectancy, at 15.1 years. Just one dog made it to age 25 in the Japanese data set. In a data set of 30,563 dogs that died between 2016 and 2020 in the UK, just 23 of them were aged over 20 when they crossed the rainbow bridge. The average life expectancy across breeds was 11.2 years.
Kubinyi herself has studied two ultra-long-lived Hungarian dogs—one aged 22 and the other aged 27. In both cases, the dogs’ age was vouched for by adults who had known them since their birth, and like Bobi, the Hungarian dogs roamed around freely and had plenty of contact with other dogs and humans—good indicators of a healthy life. But Kubinyi admits that, without verifiable paperwork, it’s difficult to know definitively how old any dog is.
One thing about Bobi raised her suspicions: From the photographs she had seen, Bobi seemed to be overweight. Such rotund dogs rarely make it to extremely old ages, she says. “Even among humans it doesn’t really happen that people with extra weight can survive for that long,” she says. Oh, and there was one other thing. In its article about Bobi, GWR had posted photos of the dog when he was much younger. In those photos, the pattern of the younger Bobi’s fur seemed to differ from that of the older Bobi. Could a dog’s coat shift over time? To answer that question, Kubinyi said, I would have to consult an expert on dog coat color.
“It is true that I am considered an expert on dog coat color,” Sheila Schmutz, an emeritus professor of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. “At least in terms of genetics.” I sent Schmutz, who has published multiple papers about the coats of dogs and cattle, a selection of photos of Bobi taken in 1999, 2016, and 2022, and asked her whether the photos appeared to be of the same dog.
Schmutz wasn’t sure. In a few photos Bobi’s fur appeared to be red, while in another it looked like he had a brown coat. Brown and red coats, Schmutz assured me, are two very different colors. “I had my husband look at the photo set too and he agrees that we can understand why people don’t think it’s the same dog in all the photos, but it’s not absolutely clear to us,” she wrote. “Wish this were more clearcut …” she signed off her email.
For certainty, I would have to look elsewhere, and so I turned to Karen Becker, a veterinarian and author of The Forever Dog: Surprising New Science to Help Your Canine Companion Live Younger, Healthier, and Longer. In several articles, Becker was credited as the person who broke the news of Bobi’s death, in a post on her Facebook page. I sent Becker a message through her website and waited for a response.
Becker, it turned out, was away lecturing, but I did get a response from her administrative assistant, Dana Adams, who was not impressed with the Guardian article casting doubt on Bobi’s longevity. “So much is incorrect,” Adams wrote. “Bobi never ate raw food, he only ate homemade cooked food, he’s a mutt not a purebred, and the lobby organization waited until the poor little guy’s cremation day to raise questions to Guinness about additional testing.”
Wait—what? A lobby organization? It was true that the GWR article about Bobi, and lots of the subsequent press coverage, had picked up on the detail that Bobi only ate “human food,” a factor that Bobi’s owner, Leonel Costa, cited as a reason for his dog’s unusual longevity. (Costa did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.) But Adams’ reference to a lobby organization seemed to be suggesting that there were dark forces behind these doubts. I pressed her for more details.
“Well, those of us in the pet space know it never goes well when you threaten a multi-billion dollar empire,” Adams wrote to me. “The Guardian article made it clear this is about the concerns vets have if people do what Leonel did and feed a home-cooked diet … Bobi directly threatens this entire industry.” Attached was a screenshot of the world’s top 10 pet food manufacturers, as ranked by petfoodindustry.com. Topping the list were Mars Petcare Inc., Nestlé Purina PetCare, and Hill’s Pet Nutrition.
I asked the three top pet food brands whether they were involved in a conspiracy to undermine the world’s oldest ever dog. Mars and Nestlé did not respond to my email. Melissa Chestnut, director of global communications at Hill’s Pet Nutrition, said that “Hill’s had no involvement with this effort.”
So this is where we’re at: The government authority in Portugal that was supposed to have verified Bobbi’s age has no data about the dog’s birth date. Guinness World Records is staying tight-lipped until its investigation is complete. Dog-aging experts aren’t totally convinced that we have enough evidence to verify Bobi’s age. Other people think, with no evidence, that it might all be a ruse by the pet food industry to shift more cans of Purina. The one person who could clear all this up—Bobi’s owner—is not responding to my messages.
For a brief moment I consider whether the previous holder of the world’s oldest living dog title, Spike the Chihuahua (aged 23 in December 2022), might be orchestrating a campaign to reclaim his title. (I am unable to confirm whether Spike the Chihuahua is still alive because no one cares about the world’s second oldest dog.)
Perhaps the greatest mysteries—Loch Ness, the abominable snowman, Ron DeSantis’ shoes—must always go unanswered.
