Guinness World Records has decided to temporarily withdraw the award for longestlived dog of all time from Bobi, who died in Portugal in October at the age of over 31, to clear up doubts about his age, the organization said on Tuesday (16).
“We have decided to temporarily suspend the titles of 'oldest living dog' and 'oldest dog ever',” a spokesman for Guinness, which certifies world records, told AFP.
Bobi died in October in the Portuguese town of Conqueiros, in the center of the country, at the age of 31 years and 165 days, according to a statement published at the time on the Guinness World Records website, which gave him the title of the longestlived human dog in the world February 2023.
“All suspicions are unfounded,” Leonel Costa, owner of Bobi, said in a statement to AFP, recalling that the verification process “lasted almost a year.”
Costa attributed the questions to “a certain elite in the veterinary world” who did not want to accept that Bobi always ate “natural foods” and not dog products.
Bobi was a purebred mutt with an average life expectancy of 12 to 14 years who lived in a house with many cats.
When he was born, the family's children hid him so that he could not be sacrificed like the dogs from the same litter.
According to a magazine research, there were doubts about his age due to different colors of his paws, yellow when he was a young animal and newer animals.
In the latest photos, the images do not appear to show any signs of a very old dog, such as “mobility problems” or “muscle mass,” veterinarian Miguel Figueiredo of the João XXI Clinic in Lisbon told AFP a year ago.