Lazare was 30 years and five months old – Copyright AFP Jeff PACHOUD<\/p>\n
A French toy spaniel named Lazare thought to have been \u201cthe world\u2019s oldest dog\u201d has died aged 30, his carer said on Friday.<\/p>\n
AFP contacted the Guinness World Records to find out if Lazare had held the record before he passed away on Thursday, but did not receive an immediate response.<\/p>\n
Lazare, a Papillon dwarf spaniel with stand-up \u201cbutterfly\u201d ears, was born on December 4, 1995, according to animal charity worker Anne-Sophie Moyon.<\/p>\n
He spent most of his life with the same owner until she died and he was then handed to the charity\u2019s shelter.<\/p>\n
Single mother Ophelie Boudol, 29, fell in love with the animal one year her senior at the shelter last month.<\/p>\n
She had initially intended to find a pet for her mother, she told AFP, but she invited Lazare to join her family instead.<\/p>\n
Lazare died just weeks later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were our little grandpa baby,\u201d Boudol wrote in a farewell post on Instagram.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou chose to take your final flight in my arms on the evening of May 14, to join your mistress who loved you so much,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
At 30 years and five months old, Lazare wore nappies, could no longer hear or see, and slept almost all day.<\/p>\n
But Boudol said he was delightfully spirited.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe really has such an endearing personality,\u201d she told AFP earlier this week as she cradled him at her home in the southeastern town of Villy-le-Pelloux.<\/p>\n
When Moyon and colleagues discovered Lazare\u2019s age, they thought \u201cLazare might be the world\u2019s oldest dog\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
They verified his birth date in two registries, and filled in the paperwork to register him for a possible record as a joke, she added.<\/p>\n
A Portuguese Rafeiro do Alentejo named Bobi was thought to be the oldest dog when he died reportedly aged 31 in 2023, according to the Guinness World Records website.<\/p>\n
But a review in 2024 found there was not enough conclusive evidence of his age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lazare was 30 years and five months old – Copyright AFP Jeff PACHOUD A French toy spaniel named…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11618,11619,5],"class_list":["post-15053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-animal","tag-dog","tag-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}