Everyone thinks that their dog is going to live forever and that the day they have to say goodbye will never come.
Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.
Unfortunately, that’s not true. Every dog has their day when they have to cross the rainbow bridge.
Even the oldest dog in the world. Maggie the Kelpie, an Australian dog, is believed to be the oldest dog in the world.
She passed away at the age of 30, or 112 in dog years, according to calculations from to The Farmer’s Almanac.
The American Kennel Club says small dogs typically live between 10 and 15 years while medium-sized dogs live to about 13, with larger dogs living to the age of 12.
“She was 30 years old, she was still going along nicely last week, she was walking from the dairy to the office and growling at the cats and all that sort of thing,” he told The Weekly Times.
Maggie’s owner, dairy farmer Brian McLaren, said Maggie’s health had started to decline about two days before she passed.
“She just went downhill in two days and I said yesterday morning when I went home for lunch … ‘She hasn’t got long now,'” he recalls.
He says she was snuggled up in her bed at night and had passed by the time he saw her in the morning.
“I’m sad, but I’m pleased she went the way she went,” McLaren said.
He was afraid that he would have to put her down. Maggie was buried under a pine tree next to one of McLaren’s other dogs. He says she will be missed.
“We were great mates, it is a bit sad,” McLaren said.
Maggie was the contender for the oldest dog in the world but McLaren lost her original paperwork so her age couldn’t be verified.
“We got her when she was only a little pup. We believe she was pretty close to 30 years old, if not she was at least 29-and-a-half,” McLaren told ABC.net.
Maggie would round up the cows on the farm in her youth but retired 12 years before she died.
“She wasn’t pampered but she has well looked after. She always had milk — not too much of it, but she loved her milk — and anything else she’d wanted,” McLaren said. “She loved chasing the motorbike. When she was up and going she would want to run along beside it, so the faster you went, the quicker she would run. She had the greatest life.”
Since Maggie’s age couldn’t be officially verified, she was disqualified from being in the Guinness Book of Records.
So, the “official” title of oldest dog in the world belongs to Bluey, an Australian cattle-dog from Rochester in Victoria.
Bluey lived to be 29-years-old and 5 months. He was bought as a puppy in 1910 and worked as a sheepdog before being put down in 1939.
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