You don't have to go back to Roman history and the vigilant geese which saved the day (or night, rather) to be aware that geese and ganders, in particular, are tough creatures. Watchdogs to change the terminology. How many children growing up in the country, in days when geese ran around farmyards and often strayed on to the road, remember places where they hurried past, even when on bicycles. The geese came at them and would pursue them 20 yards or more down the road.
They are apparently long-lived birds, if not given the chopper when ready for eating. An old copy of the English Field, dated 1982, has an interesting point to make about their life-span. Proteus was the pen-name of the regular contributor. He tells how, in the year of Dunkirk (1940), he was fishing a trout stream near a small farm when a gander attacked him. "The farmer apologised, saying the old sod was a bit short-tempered. I asked how old the sod was, and was told he could not be less than 25 years. In the year after the Coronation (1953) I fished the same brook at the same place, was again attacked in the same way and the same farmer apologised. On my remarking that this gander was about as bad-tempered as the other sod, he replied that it was the same one. With him around there was no chance of having another goose in the place. He was better than a watchdog."
"So that, the scribe calculated, "made him nearly 40 years old and senior to me at the time." And then he goes on to reason that, "while the gander was definitely in the non-commercial category of stock, early death by economic laws (i.e. our desire for meat of one sort or another on our tables) deprives us of profitable years in the lives of some productive farm animals, which may be less costly to keep alive than to reproduce, despite a lowered output. And I ponder the simple question of how long they can live, given the chance."
You would be a long time in thinking that one through. On the same page, there was a reflective requiem for a driving pony called Whiskey "a public figure" which was apparently well known at horse shows in southern England. He died at the age of a rising 37, when snow deprived him of the exercise necessary to an active animal of that age. His driving partner was called Splash.