The World's Tallest Living Dog Is a Great Dane Who Eats 12 Cups of Food Each Day

The humongous hond. The biggest boi. The largest lad. It's Zeus the Great Dane.

The 2-year-old is the tallest living dog in the world, according to Guinness World Records. He measures a towering 3 feet, 5.18 inches, meaning he could very well wander around the shallow end of swimming pools on all four legs.

"He's been a big dog since we got him, even for a puppy. He had huge paws," his owner, Brittany Davis of Bedford, Texas, told Guinness.

Davis received Zeus when he was 8 weeks old. These days, he enjoys going to the Dallas Farmers Market (where "everyone knows him," Davis says), taking walks, and snoozing by his window. He even gets zoomies, which must be quite the sight.

For fuel, this gargantuan guy eats six cups of food for breakfast and six cups for dinner, along with his favorite snacks (ice cubes) and whatever he can—very easily—steal from the counters.

"They're very impressed with how healthy he is. He loves going to the vet; he gets lots of attention," Davis told Guinness.

She said he's like another person in the house, especially compared to his three Australian shepherd siblings. Zeus plays the part well by sharing a queen-sized bed with his human brother.

Someone at a family gathering suggested Zeus could be the tallest living dog, and once the family measured him, they figured he had a shot at the record. (He comes up just short of the tallest dog ever, another Great Dane named Zeus. Young Zeus measures at 1.046 meters while the former Zeus, who died in 2014, stood at 1.118 meters.)

"We get a lot of comments like 'Wow, that's the tallest dog I've ever seen'," Davis told Guinness, "so it's cool to now be able to say 'Yes, it's definitely the tallest dog you've ever seen!'"