In September, the world’s largest dog trod with a heavy gait across the Internet, delighting some and irking others, but now a newcomer is nipping at Zeus’ fame: She might be the world’s smallest dog.
Meet Meysi, a tiny, tiny Terrier cross. This is a very small dog.
When she was born, she weighed just 1.58 ounces and had to be fed day and night, every half hour, with a syringe. She’s so small, her pet mom thought she was a piece of placenta when she was born. No. Seriously.
“It’s a miracle Meysi is even alive. When her mother Pusia started giving birth to her litter, I thought at first she had passed a piece of placenta and was about to throw it away when it suddenly started moving,” her owner Anna Pohl of Jarocin, Poland, told the Gazeta Jarocinska, according to the New York Daily News.
It was a rough beginning for the young pup and Pohl.
“The worst was the first six weeks. Zero sleep. I was feeding her day and night, every half hour. Sometimes I ran out of strength, had to call out of work,” she said.
Now, however, the pup is doing fine. She is three months old and a robust 3.25 ounces. She’s about the size of a cell phone (if you’re my parents) or a paperback thriller.
“She is a lovely little thing but you have to be very careful where you sit and where you walk,” said Pohl.
“She eats on her own now,” Pohl said in a YouTube video. “She eats Gerber baby food on her own. You can tell by her round belly that she’s got a good appetite.”
Of course, as happened with Zeus, the specter of Guinness looms large over stories like these, and talk about the World’s Smallest Dog seems to anchor every story about tiny Meysi. It’s all sort of seedy, to be honest, with the popular media playing the role of carnival barker, making a big show of records and awards and exhorting us to look behind the curtains to see the freak of nature.
Most stories, of course, fail to wonder exactly why Meysi is that size (as Casey Lomonaco wondered with Zeus.) Was she bred that way? Thankfully, it appears not:
“Her sister is three times her size,” Pohl said in the video.
But we should we temper our fascination with Meysi, lest smaller and smaller dogs become more and more fashionable and breeders try anything to keep up with the interest. JaneA Kelly just wrote a scathing rebuttal to Kim Kardashian’s decision to get a “teacup cat” for this very reason. Let’s hope Meysi’s fame doesn’t make ounce-sized dogs any more fashionable than they already are.
