Six-year-old dog Finley might look like a garden-variety golden retriever at first glance. However, this impressive pooch entered the Guinness Book of World Records in the spring of 2020.
The Molloy family never set out to raise a record holder. When Erin Malloy brought Finley, then just a 10-week-old puppy, home from college, it took a while before they started to notice that he was crazy about tennis balls.
The family observed him fetching not just one ball but as many as he could fit in his mouth at once, Erin said. When he was 2 years old, he was already accomplishing near-record feats. “I look over and he’s trotting over to me with four tennis balls in his mouth,” Erin recalled.
From there, the family realized that if they kept throwing him more, Finley would somehow find a way to make space for them. Before long, he was besting the previous record holder, a dog from Texas that could hold five at a time, as reported by the Democrat & Chronicle.
When the family finally got the news from Guinness, after a year-long process, they threw Finley a party, including friends and a cake from a local bakery. “He got pretty excited when all of our neighbors were outside his front yard,” Erin explained. “Obviously, he’s staying humble, but I think he’s pretty pumped.”
Just by virtue of his winning smile and amazing abilities, he has amassed a following of over 37,000 humans. In addition to his feat of stuffing six tennis balls at a time in his mouth, one of Finley’s most endearing and most popular tricks also involves fetching.
The trick involves getting on his back and holding a tennis ball in the air with his front legs, dropping it to the ground, and then pouncing on it—a game of fetch with no humans required.
While his record has brought him increased notoriety, it hasn’t changed his simple pleasures. “He lives the life of a king,” Cherie said, and pictures of Finley tearing into a giant cake made in his honor certainly seem to confirm it.
