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.
I know more about Guinness World Records (GWR) than anyone ought to, probably. I wrote a long read for this newspaper about the company last year. GWR controversies happen more than you might think. Sometimes, these arise from the world changing around the book: records that used to seem inoffensive enough start to look different in the light of contemporary mores. The heaviest pet title has been phased out to discourage overfeeding. In 2002, there was fierce internal debate at GWR, the editor told me, about whether they ought to include the record for the largest death toll from a terrorist attack, 2,977 on 9/11, because it might be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of the event. It also no longer awards the record for the largest terrorist organisation, last held by al-Qaida in 1988. There is the occasional cheating scandal. The longtime holder of the record for highest Donkey Kong score, Billy Mitchell, was subject to an investigation by Guinness into whether he was using modified arcade machines to achieve this feat. The company pronounced him not guilty in 2020.
But more often, stuff like this happens – occasions when the company, and the rest of us, come up against the fact that some things are just very difficult to confirm. A representative from GWR told me that it receives about 40,000 applications for record-breaking attempts each year, and undertakes a review of this scale about once a year. The estimation of the ages of animals in particular, is a tricky business. Genetic testing can’t provide an exact age. And you’re not going to ask the dog, are you?
What might this investigation involve? I asked GWR for specifics. It can’t tell me much while the review is going on. It takes its work very seriously, and it doesn’t want its investigators interfered with. But GWR has a team of people whose job it is to review evidence of records being set, either in person or, more usually, through looking at video footage, as well as links to experts all over the world in fields from neuroscience to potato cultivation, who help it work out whether record hopefuls deserve their accolades. For Bobi, it will be consulting people such as vets and canine development researchers. GWR reckons the inquest into Bobi’s age will take about three months, and then it will either officially crown or dethrone the dog.
Does any of this matter? Plainly, by many criteria, no. Yet here we are, in a world where a formal review is being undertaken into the case of this ambiguously old dog, involving dozens of people both inside and outside GWR tasked with protecting the sanctity of the superlatives of life on Earth.
I love it. Maybe I am particularly minded, as someone who spends their time writing about things like Guinness World Records, an ape escape at a zoo and a weird humming noise in Yorkshire, to think that it is good that there are people who think getting the facts right on superficially unimportant subjects is worth their time. Nobody (the dog in question excepted) lives or dies on the result of an investigation like this.
So what? Who gets to say what is and isn’t important? Why does society generally agree there is a value in knowing which human being can run the fastest, but not who can juggle eggs the longest? This is the magic of GWR, I think: the goofy dignity of it all. The application of equal rigour to every potential record, in order to build its annual snapshot of life on our planet, from the absurd to the sublime. Who cares which dog is the oldest? GWR does. And that someone does is, to me, beautiful.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist
