A Brief History
On August 6, 2005, Creme Puff, the oldest cat to make it into the 2010 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, died at the age of 38!
Digging Deeper
For those of you who have ever owned a cat, you know that 38 years is more than a ripe old age; it is next to impossible for any cat to reach. In human terms, this particular cat made it to 169 years of age, an age certainly not experienced by any man or woman in modern history. If your cat makes it to 15, that is already good, and every year beyond that is gravy on your biscuits or icing on the cake.
The reason the author is mentioning these particularly rich foods is because they helped little Creme Puff become the feline record holder. Well, not exactly, but “little” Puffy’s owner feeds his cats a diet of tuna, eggs, bacon, broccoli and asparagus, mayonnaise and coffee. This unconventional diet also helped her unrelated Sphinx housemate Granpa, the earlier record holder, make it to 34. If the owner Jake Perry can be believed, and the author is sure the Guinness Book did its research, between the two of them, they lived a total of about 36 lives rather than the common 9 per cat.
No word on how the food was prepared, but the author would gladly try the diet. This is probably evidence that many of the processed canned and dry foods that are available in stores today are not natural enough or too full of grains and fillers to adequately mimic what the cat would eat in the wild, and our pets’ health suffers accordingly. Not that feral cats eat their green veggies, but it is likely that the more “real” the food, the better it is for the animal (as is the case for humans as well).
There is little other information on these two cats on the internet, not even a picture, but the cover image the author selected for this article depicts Creme Puff as the author believes she must have looked; a cat does not get a name like that for nothing after all…
Addendum: After writing this article, the article came across the above video on Youtube, in which you can witness both Granpa (4:15) and Creme Puff (7:15) in action, and as you can see, the author was not too far off in her assessment of Creme Puff’s appearance 😉
Question for students (and subscribers): How long do you want to live? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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P.S. For those of you who are interested, the cat in the cover image is Buddha, the 31-pound Fat Cat, whose diet and exercise plan went viral on the internet. Unfortunately, the plan could not reverse a lifetime of dietary neglect, and poor Buddha died of heart failure at only 6 years of age, just 32 years shy of Creme Puff 🙁 Perhaps he should have been put on a diet of broccoli and asparagus…
Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bicket, Tammy L. and Dawn M. Brandon. Hugs for Cat Lovers (Hugs Series). Howard Books, 2008.
