The Times newspaper of December 28th, 2024, has an article on the unreliable data concerning so called ‘blue zones’ across the world where there are concentrations of centenarian people; people who are at and over 100-years-old.
The article is based on a research study by Dr Saul Justin Newman of University College London which more or less concluded that the data are unreliable because the records are taken from local authorities where there is poor record keeping and from areas where there is pension fraud.
What this means is that there are people making claims for pensions from the government for people who are deceased! Unsurprising actually. It is benefit fraud which is rampant in the UK for instance. This means that the records indicate that the 100-year-old pensioner is alive and receiving a pension when they no longer exist. In short, the data are misleading.
The article made me think about cat longevity records as listed by Wikipedia and other websites. It did not take me long to confirm that the evidence supporting the age of these celebrated record holders is very flimsy and also cannot, in my opinion, be relied upon.
People like to read about records concerning cats’ ages, sizes and weights. This fascination leads to unreliability because of another human fascination: the desire for celebrity. To be recognised as someone different. Sometimes cat owners can achieve this vicariously through the age of their cat.
The infographic summarises what I want to say.
I’ll quote from The Times article on centenarians:
“Newman’s theory is that a combination of economic deprivation and weak bureaucracy has skewed global centenarian league tables. ‘Most of the extremely old people in the world come from places that have lots of errors in record-keeping and lots of pension fraud.'”
It surprises me that Gunness World Records does not provide any evidence whatsoever to support the age of the most celebrated oldest domestic cat ever, ‘Creme Puff’. This cat is well-known in the cat world.
You’d have thought that Guinness would publish excellent evidence but no. Nothing.
Ultimately all the world’s oldest cat records comes down to what the owner says! They provide the evidence and in scientific or legal terms it is simply not good enough.
It is anecdotal evidence which is not scientific (which can be verified objectively). It is often based on individual accounts, rather than reliable research or statistics. Often the cat caretakers are seeking celebrity, I would allege.
As such I don’t think Guinness or any website should present information about the oldest cats without a big warning on the page about the veracity of the claim.
There is an argument that the oldest cat records should be abolished completely as was the heaviest domestic cat. In the case of the latter, it led to people overfeeding their cats to try and attain a new record which was very much against cat welfare.
More: oldest cat
A final point: there must be many other super-old cats who could have taken the record as the world’s oldest but did not because their owner couldn’t be bothered to contact Guinness. And there are many old cats with uncertain ages because record keeping for cat age is indeed very poor.
