Huge Dog With Horse Photograph

The claim

Circulating image depicts a huge dog and a horse being lead through a park ( Full commentary below ).

This photograph of a horse and extremely large dog being walked by a man and a woman is circulating via email, blog posts and online forums. Many of the examples that have been submitted to Hoax-Slayer have contained no details or description other than a catchy subject line. Others have claimed that the dog in the picture is Hercules, a dog classified as the world’s biggest by Guinness World Records.However, this description was apparently taken from an article about Hercules available on eBay Guides and elsewhere on the Internet and does not seem to have any genuine connection to the image. Both Hercules and Kell, the other world record winning dog mentioned in the article, are certainly very large animals. However, neither are as large as the gigantic animal shown in the photograph. Hercules weighed in at 282 pounds while Kell tipped the scales at 286 pounds. The almost horse-sized creature depicted in the image would surely weigh considerably more.

If real, a dog of such enormous proportions could have easily taken out the world’s largest or world’s heaviest dog record and the animal would have garnered considerable media attention.

It seems clear that the image has been cleverly manipulated, perhaps by replacing a picture of the man’s horse with a disproportionally sized picture of a dog.