For several years, Internet users have been publishing photographs that allegedly depict the largest horse that has ever lived on the planet. We have verified the authenticity of these photographs and the veracity of the claims.
Photos of horses with dark colors
Since the spring of 2023, an allegedly vintage photograph (and its mirrored image) has been circulating on social networks. version) horse and six people, which are about half the size of the animal. In the captions it is described as the largest horse in the world. Sometimes the authors of such publications provide details that vary from post to post: the horse’s name was either Samson, or Sampson, he was born either in 1846 year, or in 1867 and weighed either 1520 kg, or 1524, was photographed either in 1846 year, or in 1859. A post with this photo posted in the public “Leonardo Divinchik"on VKontakte in May 2023, received 3.4 million views. On the same social network there are many similar publications that have received tens and hundreds of thousands of views; some of them appeared quite recently (examples here, here, here And here). Similar entries can also be found in Odnoklassniki (here, here And here) and on TikTok, where there is only one video in Russian gained 349,000 views, and for English speakers rollers there are millions of views.
Around the same period, another photograph (and its mirror image) was circulating on the Internet. version) a similar horse standing in a crowd of people. The caption read: “This is the biggest horse in the world. He weighed 1846 kg and lived in the 19th century.” Although individual posts received tens of thousands of views, this photo did not become as popular on RuNet as the previous one, and most of the posts with it appeared on VKontakte (here, here, here, here, here And here).
A closer look at the first image reveals many anomalies and oddities. For example, the faces of some people captured in the photo are distorted, they have deformed hands, and part of the harness at the horse’s neck seems to be hanging in the air. Such visual inconsistencies and artifacts are one of the main signs that the image was generated by a neural network. To the same conclusion came fact checkers from Snopes, and the Facta project found out, that this picture was first published on April 8, 2023 on Facebook*. User Mervyn Chapman posted photo in the Midjourney Official community - it is dedicated to the Midjourney program, which, using artificial intelligence creates images based on text descriptions.
Chapman published more than one picture created in a neural network, but shared a whole selection of supposedly old photographs with various huge animals. The author came up with this accompanying legend: “Early attempts to breed larger animals for both food and work were controversial. In one such attempt, a researcher accidentally crossed his own genes with those of a snail. All documents from these experiments have disappeared, except for these photographs, saved by an unscrupulous researcher."
The situation is similar with the second viral photo. Upon closer inspection, it is noticeable that the faces and hands of almost all the people captured in the picture are greatly distorted. Sometimes it's a picture of a horse distribute as part of a selection of archival photos with giant animals, which show a huge dog, pigeon, cat, sheep, etc. “Verified” analyzed the photo using services AI or Not and tools Maybe's AI Art Detector. In both cases, according to the results, the image was most likely created by a neural network.
Photos of horses with light colors
The first of the images analyzed above was checked for authenticity and “Noodles Media” - a quasi-fact-checking project close to the Russian authorities, ANO Dialogue Regions. In a refutation of "Noodles" on website and on "Peekaboo“It was indicated that the picture was generated by the Midjourney neural network, and Chapman was named as the author. At the same time, the text notes that viral publications also contain reliable information: “If you believe the Guinness Book of Records, the largest horse in the world was born in 1846.” Further in the analysis of “Noodles” there is a screenshot articles on the ProHorse website, which supposedly shows a Shire horse named Sampson, which was recognized as the largest in the world and was subsequently renamed Mammoth. The horse's height was reported to be 219 cm. Noodles partner website Ura.ru, which previously distributed dozens of fakes, reportedthat the animal's name was Samson and that it weighed 1524 kg. However, at the end of its analysis, “Noodles” provided another photo with the following caption (spelling and punctuation preserved): “The largest horse in the world, named Samson, was 2 m 20 cm tall and weighed 1520 kg. He came from a British breed of draft horse, the Shire.”
These two photos themselves, supposedly the largest horse in history, can be found on other sites. For example, on Instagram* fast about Sampson with a similar caption in Russian was posted back in 2021. In 2022, Telegram channel "Film"(91,000 views) reported that this horse was photographed in 1928. The same two photographs with similar descriptions are found in the article about horses in “Zene"(moreover, the author claims that Samson’s achievement is not registered in the Guinness Book of Records), as well as on websites FB.ru And TopTimes. Moreover, a link to one of these photos allegedly of Sampson is given in Community Notes, a social network X tool that allows users to add important context to tweets that contain manipulation or misinformation.
“Verified” conducted a reverse search on the first photo and found out that it depicted a Belgian draft dog (Brabançon) named Brooklyn Supreme. Original photo stored in the Grinnell College Library, Iowa. According to the caption on the archive website, the photograph was taken in the USA in the first half of the 20th century, and at the time of photography the horse was 14 years old.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, Brooklyn Supreme lived from 1928 to 1948 and was indeed a record holder. For example, in the publication 1986 the stallion was called the largest horse, specifying that he was the heaviest horse ever recorded. The dimensions were also reported: shortly before death (however, according to the book 1991, measured in 1938) Brooklyn Supreme weighed 3,200 pounds (1,451.5 kg), and his height at the withers was 6 feet 6 inches (198.1 cm). In the publication 1987 added information about coverage chest: 102 inches (259.1 cm), while on other resources indicated 10 ft 2 in (309.9 cm).
After conducting a similar search on the second photo, which supposedly shows Samson/Sampson, Verified found the photo on the website of a British farm Tynybryn. There indicatedthat the photo shows a Shire stallion named Gray King of Albion. The short description says that the horse was once sold to London and, according to rumors, drove the Lord Mayor's carriage.
As for the horse with the largest documented height, according to the Guinness Book of Records, 1986, in fact it was Sampson, a Shire gelding from Great Britain. It was reported that the tallest horse, which was later renamed Mammoth, was born in 1846, and already in 1850 the height of the animal was 7 feet 2.5 inches (more than 219 cm). It also said that the horse later weighed 3,360 pounds (1,524 kg). On the Guinness Book of Records website Sampson also named the heaviest horse.
Although there are no publicly available photographs of Sampson (probably none at all), the horse's size can be compared to the size of a Belgian gelding named Big Jake. He was born in 2001 in the USA and until his death in 2021, he held the title of the tallest living horse according to the Guinness Book of Records. Jake was 82.75 inches (210.19 cm) tall.
Thus, none of the pictures distributed on the Internet show the largest horse in history, because there are simply no photographs of Sampson (or Mammoth) (at least they have not been published). A significant part of such publications use images generated by a neural network, but some posts contain genuine photos of real horses, which, nevertheless, did not reach record heights. However, most publications provide incorrect information about the size of the record horse and details of the animal’s biography.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: collage “Checked”
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