Tallest Cat Living - Guinness World Records

Call him the Big Chungus or the Chonk. He just grew and grew like Clifford the Big Red Dog. His nickname is the Floofus, this big long tail. He's a really good jumper. I love my cats, I do everything for them. They want for nothing, I'll put it that way. My dad always jokes that if he ever dies he wants to be reincarnated as one of my cats because he doesn't think there could be a better situation to be. My name is Will Powers and I am a four time Guinness World Record holder when it comes to my cats. So this is Fenrir, he is an F2 Savannah cat. A Savannah cat is a breed that basically starts off at the very beginning with an African Serval and then it's bred to domestic cats. But his official height, his record, is for 18.83 inches tall. It's measured at the withers, right here, like a shoulder blades when he's standing up on all fours. Altair is the boy who has the world's longest tail on a living cat. He is a Maine Coon, specifically a brown ticked tabby silver Maine Coon. And he is, I believe, 16.07 inches long from his tail, from the tip to the base. Which is not as long as his brother Cygnus but it's still impressively long. My story is long and complicated. We wanted to get a Savannah cat. We got Arcturus, Arcturus was a 16 week old Savannah kitten. We needed a kitten for our kitten. So we decided to adopt another Maine Coon and we adopted Cygnus. Cygnus was the cat that obviously had the longest tail ever. So the real reason that I wanted to do the records in the first place when it became obvious that they were going to be absolutely gargantuan cats was that at the time, being president of a cat shelter, I thought this would be a great way to help raise funds for the shelter so I could help take care of some more disadvantaged Detroit cats. They got the records going away. They basically were the tallest cat to ever live and the longest tail ever seen on a cat. And we had a wonderful life at that time. And then November 12th, 2017, I woke up and the house was on fire. It's just, I did everything I could. I tried to put it out. I called 911. I searched the house for them as long as I could. I was in a room that was so filled with smoke that I could not see anymore. I was feeling around for them. I passed out. I hit the ground. I realized when I woke back up on the ground, because the air was a little better, that if I didn't get out, I was going to die. I opened every window and door that I could find just to give them escape paths. But then, you know, obviously the services, you know, fire department, police, everybody showed up and they dragged me out of there, more or less kicking and screaming. And that's how it happened. The house burned to the foundation. I was heartbroken. I don't really have words to describe what that was like, but I wasn't well for a long time afterwards. I didn't work for a long time, but eventually I started to get better and I missed having cats. It was really hard because at first I almost kind of resented the cats that I got because they weren't the same cats. They were different. And I really wanted to bond with them. But, you know, Hyperion, which was the first one, the first Bengal, worked his way into my heart. He is just such a good cat. He just loves to be held and snuggled and pay attention. And he sort of helped heal my soul. Altair came into my life just shy of a year from the day of the fire. I found out from the breeder that had bred Cygnus that a sibling had been born. I thought about it, I thought about it, and I really missed having a fluffy one. And so I decided, okay, the main reason that I didn't originally want to jump on it is that I was afraid that he would look too much like his brother. Now that he's grown up, he looks very different from Cygnus. Different colored eyes, different everything. But I was nervous because I was, like I said, I was really struggling at that time. But it was fairly obvious, I'd say, from about three to six months on that he was going to have a really long tail. He went to the vet and the vet was looking at me like, what's up with this? Are you doing it again? I'm like, I'm not trying to. Years later, after all this happened, out of nowhere, the two kittens were born that were the direct siblings of Arcturus, the big boy. And I couldn't say no. And Arcturus was like my best friend, man. I loved that cat. And so now I have six. They make my life well. They made me get well, I guess. They gave me a reason to climb out of that hole. I would describe Fenrir, I would say that he is very friendly and outgoing. He works as a therapy cat, actually, at my office. And so I'm a physician. Patients, they often come in anxious and stressed and Fen is just there to kind of support them. So he wanders around the office and he's such a big, lovable cat and everybody's tripped out by his size. But he's very friendly and he loves to be petted. He is a ravenously hungry cat all the time. And we have to actually limit his food now that he's getting bigger because he's getting too big. But he will devour anything. Altair is the one cat that has a different personality really than all the other ones. He's very loving. He likes to be snuggled and held. He's embarrassed to play. And so if you catch him playing by himself, like with something, he'll look at you and be like, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I'm okay. He talks with his tail a lot more than the other boys do. It's long, it's very, very long. And I can tell his moods and what he's interested in based on how he positions his tail. If he has a question mark tail, like inquisitiveness, as funny as it is when it's curled over, he's kind of interested. If he's very excited, he'll stand straight up and wiggle it like this and it'll flash in the air. And so with this big, long tail, he has that ability. He's an interesting fellow. Because Fen is so tall, there's a lot of stuff he can do that other cats simply wouldn't be able to do. Earlier when we were trying to take some pictures of him, we had to shut some of the other cats out of the room and Fenrir decided he didn't want to be in the room anymore. So he stood on his hind legs and opened the door. There aren't many cats that could do that. Besides that, the hungry boy Fenrir, the hungry, hungry Fenrir, he tends to steal things off the countertop if they're too close to the edge. Maine Coons will take until five years old to reach their full size. So he has a good while until he'll reach the full age of five. His tail will get longer than it is now, for sure. Fenrir is still growing. For now, I think the living record is enough and we'll leave the all-time record with his brother. But we'll see how big he grows.