This is the world’s largest dog – or?

This is a picture of Hercules, the world’s largest dog, according to a widely circulated mass email that began circulating in the spring of 2007. Hercules was said to be an English Mastiff. However, the trained eye can immediately notice two subtle inaccuracies with the photograph: 1) The dog in the picture is quite obviously a Neapolitan Mastiff, which is a completely different breed than the English one, and 2) there aren’t that many big dogs. If that were the case, the dogs would rule the world, and all mankind would be engaged in slave labor for Pedigree Pal. The image is actually a creatively gifted product of a little work in the image processing program Photoshop.

However, it actually happens that the world’s largest dog was once called Hercules and was actually an English mastiff. Here you can see a picture of him together with his master, immortalized by the Guinness Book of Records with a nice view from the home in Massachusetts looming in the background. Apparently, Hercules’ weight record is due to advanced corpulence, rather than having the height of a pony at the withers.

Tip: Anyone who is interested in seeing pictures of ridiculously large animals that have not been helped on the trot by Adobe, should immediately google the “liger” which also happened to be named Hercules. A liger is what happens when a female tiger mates with a male lion. The congenitally sterile animal lacks the growth-inhibiting hormone that the genes from the father tiger should have contributed with, and whose task is to keep the offspring at a reasonable size. The liger Hercules lives in Miami every day, weighs half a ton and likes to eat around 50 kilos of cured meat a day. An interesting curiosity in this context is that a male tiger that mates with a female lion instead results in a tiglon, which, on the contrary, are sickly small.