Story on the oldest cat in the world-age 24.
I would have guessed (since the world record is 38 apparently) that the oldest living cat would be in the 30’s or thereabouts.
We got Pussywillow when I was 2 1/2, and she kept on going until cancer finally claimed her at age 19. For years my younger sister was a bit weirded out by a cat which was older than her.
Decided to add birds to said poll.
Crap-forgot the multiple choice option…dang…
There’s a guy in our neighborhood who claims his beagle is 30 or so. He doesn’t look a day over 10 to me.
I have a really big goldfish that is somewhere around 7 years old.
One of my dogs is 14 years old, one that is 9 years old, we have a cat that is around 14 years old, and a couple of others that are 10 years old.
I was lucky enough to share 16 years with Jake - a tiny mite of a puppy who’d been hit by a car when I scooped him up from the roadside and begged and bargained with a vet to please save him. Best money I ever spent!
But Sport - a little dachshund/chihuahua/something else mutt - was probably older when he died. I was 14 at the time, and Sport had come into the family as a stray before I was born. Best estimate was that he was probably 17, maybe as old as 19, when he died. He was an awesome dog, not a yappy little lapdog, but a big confident companion conveniently packed into a compact body. (True story: about a year before his death, Sport was almost completely blind due to cataracts. Nevertheless, when the neighbor’s insane American bulldog attacked me in my own yard? Sport was right there, fighting that big dog off of me. By the time my mother and I extracted Sport from the melee, he was covered in blood, and we just knew that our poor old fellow had fought his last battle. Turned out that all of the blood was from the bulldog. Sport just got under Samson’s belly and latched on to the bigger dog’s neck, where Samson couldn’t reach him.)
I sort of can’t believe it myself, but my parents found a stray kitten before I was born. That cat died when I was 21, so she was older than 21 years. She was an outdoor/indoor cat, tough as nails and sweet as a button.
I said dog and 14. I have two right now (half sisters) that are both 14 so I might go higher.
24 seems awfully low for a world’s oldest cat; I would hazard a guess that there are older ones out there, but documentation is probably a pain to acquire. I had a cat who died at 24 or 25. Got her for my 8th birthday in August of 1982 (and she was a few months old even then, a stray found and nursed back to health by the resident cat lady at my mom’s job), and I finally had her euthanized in December of 2006.
When I was a kid we had a barn cat who lived to be 21, or possibly 22. He was an outdoor cat by choice - he’d come inside to eat sometimes, but then wanted right back out. Never neutered or any sort of vet care. (Rural Scotland, '60s and '70s - he died in 1988.)
I’ve tended to have large dogs, which don’t typically live as long as smaller ones. So far the oldest was my dear old Phoebe aka the Mean Queen. She was a Lab x GSD x who knows, an 80 lb mutt. She was 15 when she passed.
Miss Austen was nearly 19 when her kidneys finally gave out last summer.
My still-living cat is about 16. We’ll see how far she goes.
My record holder is my current cat, 18 and still healthy, if somewhat creaky
We had an African Dwarf frog named Bubbaloon (“the froggy balloon”) that lived an incredible 16 years. He was purchased via snail mail as a tadpole and lived in a 5 gallon tank. He outlived a series of sucker fish that we put in to keep him company.
He learned to eat bits of his food off my finger, which I would hold just above the waterline.
Every spring he would sing a chirping song that sounded like a grasshopper under water. I think it was a mating call. Twice we tried to put another African frog in with him, but the new ones never lived more than six or seven months.
I’ve never met anyone who had an African frog that lived this long. In fact, I suspect the only people who believe me are the ones who knew Bubbaloon personally.
We adopted Bernie, a border collie/lab mix, from a no-kill shelter when she was about a year anna half - in that brief time, she’d been there twice! I’m not sure why - she was one of the sweetest, gentlest pups we’d ever had. She was somewhere over 15 when we finally had to have her put down - we knew it was time when she walked into a corner and just stood there, not knowing what to do because of the walls - poor old girl had doggie dementia. She’d also forgotten her house training, and we think she was going deaf.
Our current crop is varied: Taz the bengal is around 9, Ziva the long-haired mental case is 6, I think, and Higgs the pug will be 2 in July. We will have critters for some time to come, I’m sure.
Darryl the goldfish. 22 years old. (Larry and his other brother Darryl came to grief long ago.)
I imagine that a pet rock can live for many millions of years. 
I suspect every single person who remembers Pet Rocks is still kicking themselves for not being the one to make millions off such a simple idea. 
Rabbit #2 (not on the poll) lived 10 years, 3 months; in people years that’s 77–year 1=21, each additional year=6.
Nowadays this is not unusual, house rabbits can go 15 years; there have been great strides in rabbit veterinary medicine in the last 25 years.
I had a German shepherd dog which died at the age of 12.
Lacey Jane Bluefeather, Appaloosa mare extraordinaire, turned 24 years old on May 2. Her health is great – she could easily live another 10 years!
The oldest animal was a horse, he was 33+ when I finally had to say goodbye. And yeah, he was a pet. He certainly wasn’t useful except as a money pit 
(and as a dear friend, of course!)
I had a parrot that was over 25, my oldest dog died at 18 and my oldest cat so far was 19 when her kidneys gave out.
Currently among my herd o’ critters I have a 27 yo Thoroughbred, 2 twenty-something ponies, and a 17 yo cat. All the rest are between 9 mo & 12 yrs, more or less.