Weighing 1.25 tons, and towering 6ft 6in at the shoulder, Chilli dwarfs most horses, is the same height as a small elephant, and could provide enough steaks to feed an army.
Despite his size, Miss Clarke described him as being “very friendly and gentle.”
The steer grazes on grass during the day and enjoys the occasional swede as a treat. A farmer abandoned him and his twin sister Jubilee on the sanctuary's doorstep in September 1999, when he was six days old. The sanctuary named him Chilli because it already had a cow called Chutney.
He would normally have been on a farm and slaughtered for meat at an early age. But because he has been in a sanctuary he has lived to the age of nine.
Miss Clarke said: “As the years passed we noticed he was getting rather tall.
”Although he weighs over a ton he is quite lean and not as fat as some of his companions. We don't know what has made him so tall. He doesn't eat that much and Jubilee is 6ft in comparison. His feet and head are in proportion; he is just very large.”
Balancing him on a set of scales would need 16 St Bernard dogs; 12 newborn elephants; five adult gorillas; or 1.5 Smart cars. He could provide 5,510 8 oz steaks.
The sanctuary has referred Chilli's details to Guinness World Records in the hope that it might claim a record. Guinness World Records said it was researching the application.
As of November last year, the record for the tallest oxen is Fiorino, an Italian chianina ox who measured 6 ft 8 in to the withers.
The largest cow on record was an American Holstein-Durham cross named Mount Katahdin, which stood at 6 ft 2 in and had a girth measuring 13 ft. The cow died in a barn fire in 1923.
Courtesy Telegraph.co.uk
