https://longeviquest.com/2025/01/exceptional-longevity-is-not-unique-to-humans/

An editorial I wrote last year where I studied common “secrets” that were reported by supercentenarians in media and I found that there are some common traits among supercentenarians such as spirituality, avoiding stress, working hard and having social relationships. Still, some of these abilities may appear uniquely “human” and not something that we would ever observe in animals, right? Would this also mean that animals are unable to achieve exceptional longevity?

Probably not as there are several species of animals that live for way longer than the oldest humans do. The bowhead whale is likely the one most people have heard of as this mammal can live for several centuries while swimming around in the cold waters of the Arctic… Brr! Being subdued in cold water and having a very low pulse does definitely contribute to a long life. Research confirms this as there is an inverse relationship between resting heart rate and longevity for many organisms, meaning that a lower pulse results in a longer life (Boudoulas et al., 2015). In the early 1900s some also speculated that there were a finite number of heartbeats before the body wore out, the so called “rate-of-living theory” (Stark et al., 2020) which is now mostly disputed. Even so, it is difficult to track exceptional longevity in wild animals as they don’t really have birth certificates available, meaning that one can only estimate how old a wild animal actually is.

Therefore one has to turn to captive-bred animals to get accurate longevity “records.” Thankfully, we also

observe that some pets are able to live long lives. Large parrots can live for over 50 years in captivity and buying a chick is thus a lifetime commitment (and potentially also for one’s offspring). The reportedly oldest known parrot that I have found is a blue-and-gold macaw named Charlie who was “at least” 114 years old upon the time of their death. Still, this is a controversial story as Charlie purportedly belonged to Winston Churchill at one point in time, which can be put in relation to similar far-fetched stories that are observed in some human exceptional longevity claims, and this story has been dismissed by Churchill’s relatives.

Hmm.. It is hard to validate human age claims in most places as there is a lack of birth records and pets are even less likely to possess said documentation. Maybe dogs or cats then? While they won’t live remotely close to humans it should still be possible to find a few outliers, right? The average lifespan for a dog is about 10 years for larger breeds and 13 for smaller and for cats it’s about 15. So a “supercentenarian” dog would probably have to have lived past 20 and a cat a bit over 25. Are there any such verifiable claims?

Checking Wikipedia one can find that the oldest dog, Bluey, lived to be 29.5 years old. Bluey was supposedly born in 1910 and died in 1939 and was a medium-sized breed. In fact, most dogs reported to have lived past 25 years were larger breeds and several were born in the early- to mid-1900s without specified birthdates so it is questionable if these dogs actually possessed documentation to substantiate their claims. Another dog named Bobi that died recently was at one point a few years back believed to have lived to 31 but this claim is now disputed due to a lack of documentation. When checking some other claims it appears that several of the dogs didn’t reside with the same family for their entire lives. Some were adopted at “age 10” and so, meaning that their final ages are pure estimates. In fact, the oldest dog that I could find has substantial records from the period of his birth and a specified birthdate is TobyKeith, a Chihuahua born in 2001 that died in 2024 at age 23. That’s impressive!

My own dog, Kia, turned 14 a few days ago and while she probably won’t live anywhere close to TobyKeith I hope that she can stay with me for a few more years. She’s still out doing 10ks with me daily, so I hope that her activity level has given her a bit of a “longevity boost”.

Cats live a bit longer and the oldest reported cat, Creme Puff, died at age 38 in 2005. Apparently the owner was a master at keeping cats alive for a long time and six of his cats managed to live past 30.. He attributed their long lives to a diet of turkey bacon, broccoli, coffee and red wine? Upon checking further several of these long-lived cats didn’t have any documentation either. The current oldest living cat, Flossie, recently turned 29 and also has a history of owner-changes but she appears to at least have documentation supporting her age.

But what about smaller pets? At the Longevity Summits in Dublin in 2023 and 2024 rodents such as the naked mole rat and mice were hot topics. The oldest lab mouse, Yoda, lived a few weeks past his fourth birthday. There are studies underway that hope to extend this record but they have been unable to trump it as of now.

What can we conclude from this? Well, (most) animals aren’t people and it appears even more difficult to substantiate the ages of most exceptionally old pets than it is for people. Hopefully this may change as we get better record-keeping for animals as well. It is likely that the same factors that lead to long lives in people (e.g., good genes, lack of stress, healthy living) also result in long-lived animals. So give your pet lots of love and a good life and maybe visit the vet regularly to get a consistent document-chain if you want to validate its lifespan…

References

Boudoulas, K. D., Borer, J. S., & Boudoulas, H. (2015). Heart Rate, Life Expectancy and the Cardiovascular System: Therapeutic Considerations. Cardiology, 132(4), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1159/000435947

Stark, G., Pincheira-Donoso, D., & Meiri, S. (2020). No evidence for the ‘rate-of-living’ theory across the tetrapod tree of life. Global Ecology and Beigeography, 29(5), 857–884. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13069