"Bobi", world's oldest dog, stripped of title

January 16, 2024 8:53 AM

"Bobi", world's oldest dog, stripped of title Bobi, who passed away in October at the alleged old age of 31, has been stripped of his "World's Oldest Dog" title as questions swirl about the legitimacy of the claim. Interested parties (me) can confirm that whether or not he lived to the ripe old age of 31, Bobi was a good boy. (previously and previouslier)
posted by dis_integration (18 comments total)

You should hear how old the Milkshake Duck is.

It seems like every time I hear about "world's oldest living creature" it turns out to be a probable fraud. See also Jeanne (Yvonne) Calment although also this update.
posted by Nelson at 9:07 AM on January 16 [5 favorites]

So what I hear is that my 19 year old has a shot at the title? :)
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:00 AM on January 16 [2 favorites]

It was a good fraud, Brent

[This dents my faith in humanity. Not in doggity though.]
posted by chavenet at 12:34 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]

Read with lazy interest and good humor until I got to the bit where Dr Karen Becker, the wellness veterinarian, was invoking conspiratorial dog food company narratives again and darkly estimating that the forces of Purina were coming for her pet implausible story.

Because of course she is. I am really impatient about the amount of anti-science conspiracizing that is generally accepted in dog spaces, guys, and people like Karen Becker are massively responsible for pushing those narratives. Evidence based medicine is a thing, y'all, and "home cooked" diets are not necessarily any better for dogs than standardized dry diets--and they can be worse, depending on what the owner can and does source. At least you're not risking Salmonella to the extent of the raw folks, I guess. Or normalizing anti-vax sentiment, which is how my spouse nearly got sucked into anti-vax circles like... ten years ago.

(By the way, re: her argument that Bobi was obviously a mixed breed, it's worth that Guinness initially listed him as a purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo on his owner's say-so. Noting that, the breed in question is apparently normally decidedly in the "light mastiff" category, and there's... there's no way that is an accurate summary of what that dog is. He looks like a firmly small-to-medium mixed breed dog. Still, it's hardly a clear failure to get the facts straight if the owner lied to Guinness!)

Color-wise, I'm not super impressed by the identity of two presented 1990s-era photos of Bobi: [1] [2]

Neither photo clearly shows Bobi's markings, especially the chest marking that might be expected to be most indicative. Both photos indicate a dog with a white patch around the tip of the muzzle under the nose which 2020s-era Bobi definitively does not have, and while lighting is somewhat unclear, the 1990s dog appears to have a black nose... but 2020s-era Bobi is clearly a base-liver (or brown, or chocolate, or red--dog people call this color a lot of things) dog, which means he should not be capable of producing black pigment anywhere. This is not the sort of thing that can be explained by age. Finally, the dog in the 90s-era photos has a longer, thinner muzzle, which is fairly evident in [1]... but not evident in a similarly posed photo from 2023 (source).

I would be extremely surprised to find out that Bobi was genuine, put it like that.
posted by sciatrix at 1:34 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]

The Calment doubts seem to be based entirely on the fact she was an outlier. Which is certainly a reason for careful examination, but there appears to be zero actual *evidence* of fraud, and a fair amount of evidence that it would have been hard to get away with, given her continued interaction with the same locality and officials.
posted by tavella at 1:36 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Jeanne Calment was a fucking fake. Super easy to prove or disprove it: Her DNA is in a private file in a lab, but her family estate refuses to release it for "privacy" reasons. If her DNA was released then she'd be proven by comparing the genetic distance to her surviving relatives.
posted by ovvl at 2:03 PM on January 16

She doesn't have any surviving family, it's a sample donated for a specific project and the holders have said they don't regard it as ethical to use it for other reasons.
posted by tavella at 2:14 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]

It’s presumably always much more likely, as a baseline, that an individual is pretending to be 120 years old than that they are actually 120 years old, so it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical in Calment’s case, but I’m not sure the fevered spinning of counternarratives of her life does much to help uncover the truth past a certain point. Either someone eventually tests the samples or they don’t.
posted by atoxyl at 2:55 PM on January 16

Harris aka HBomberGuy went down an amazing rabbithole (2 hour youtube that goes on a wild ride) about the origins of the Roblox 'oof' noise that ended up getting several of someone's Guinness records revoked, because it turns out all it takes to get a Guinness record a lot of times is a check to Guinness and a completely unsubstantiated claim that you did a thing.
posted by FatherDagon at 5:14 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

I was like 40 years old before I realized Guinness World Records was the same company as Guinness Beer and that the purpose of the record books was to settle bar bets. They weren't the defining record of human accomplishment, they were a modern freak show. A defining characteristic of growing up GenX was learning that TV was lying to you.
posted by Nelson at 5:22 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

This dog sent me down the rabbit hole of Jeanne Calment.

I read several thousand words on it.

In the end, the “she’s a fake” arguments are weaker than the “she’s legit” arguments.

It’s very hard to see how Yvonne, the daughter, came to pass herself off as Jeanne, the mother.

And I went in wanting to see her as a fake. As that just felt like a better story.
posted by teece303 at 10:14 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]

I know people who're in the community of people who research supercentenarians. The documentary evidence for Jeanne Calment's age is very, very good. A friend once told me that the statistical unlikelyhood of how well she was documented is as much of an outlier as her age, which I guess just goes to show that for extraordinary claims you need extraordinary evidence.
posted by Kattullus at 12:03 AM on January 17 [3 favorites]

I see Calment's truly extra-ordinary age as the extraordinary claim. There's plenty of evidence supporting her claim, but it's all not quite as perfect as doubts allow, even though it makes a nice looking stack of paper.

But that DNA being suppressed is a massive red flag on the whole question. Really, just analyze it and then I'll shut up.
posted by ovvl at 8:56 AM on January 17

What doubts? I'm honestly asking, becuase Jeanne Calment's life is incredibly well documented, with scores of documents through-out her life, and many photographs.

The countertheory is that her daughter who, based on photographs, wasn't close to being her doppelganger, pretended that she died instead of her mother, and then impersonated her for the rest of her natural life. And that everyone else in her family and community went along with it. That is a wiiiiild theory, and would, indeed, require some incredible proof.
posted by Kattullus at 11:49 AM on January 17 [4 favorites]

Just in regards to her family, Yvonne's father would have to live with his daughter as if she was his wife for nearly a decade, her husband would have to pretend his wife was dead for nearly 30 years, her seven year old son would be supposed to never indicate that his mom was his mom, and then she'd have to suborn the priest that attended her mother, at least two notaries, have to abandon her entire social circle and friends... all to avoid a tax bill. And then there's the fact that Jeanne lived in the same apartment from her marriage until she moved into a home for the elderly, with her daughter living either in the same apartment or one next door. The neighbors aren't going to notice that the daughter is pretending to be the neighbor they've known for decades? When you are building a castle that elaborate and bizarre, you really need to provide some actual evidence of any such thing happening.
posted by tavella at 11:08 PM on January 17 [3 favorites]

Update, the Portuguese media is reporting that Bobi has not been "stripped of his title" but that the nomination process for new candidates has been suspended while they assess the process. That is to say, he may yet be stripped of the title, but so far has not. And since new candidates are not being accepted, Bobi's record may stand for a long time. [Bobi's person blames the kerfuffle on "big processed dog food," saying in part Bobi lived so long because he never ate that stuff]

The Guinness Book of Records has clarified the process for awarding the title of oldest dog in the world to the Portuguese mutt Bobi, who will have lived for 31 years. The dog's owner, Leonel Costa, contacted Guinness to clarify his doubts. In response, in an email to which the CM had access, Madalyn Bielfeld, from Guinness, says that an evaluation process is taking place and that she has only "temporarily suspended applications" for records, so she has not withdrawn the title of record holder from Bobi. “Nothing was by chance and everything had a single purpose, which is called ‘processed animal feed business’”, says Leonel Costa. from tabloid Correio da Manhã via Google Translate
posted by chavenet at 3:44 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

*dry* Because of course the all-powerful kibble companies heard of this Guinness World record, and they knew they had to squash it or everyone would know that home cooked diets are the only healthy way to go so you can guarantee that your dog will live to be 30!

Becker's an American, but she apparently went to great efforts to meet with this dog in person multiple times between his submission to Guinness in July 2022 and his death--and she's actually the person who broke the news of Bobi's death to the media. I sure am interested to learn what the timeline of her relationship with Costa actually was.
posted by sciatrix at 10:07 AM on January 18

also, Portugal X is now photoshopping Bobi into recognizable historic moments like the April 25th revolution (1974), the trucker standoff on one of the Lisbon bridges (early 1990s) and the big bean feast on the newer Lisbon bridge (1998) [links are all X links] plenty more at the hashtag #BobiNoPanteao
posted by chavenet at 10:48 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]