What You Don't Know About Toybobs

Good Things DO Come in Small Packages!

- Candilee Jackson

Breeders and pet owners alike often express the wish that their kitten could remain a kitten forever. Kitten antics, play and ferocious “discoveries” around the home are too cute for words, but all too soon, kittens grow up and the cuteness starts to diminish. What if that wish could come true … to have a cat remain a kitten for a lifetime - not just with regard to purrsonality, but in size!

Cat Talk would like to introduce you to the Toybob, one of the smallest of the domestic cat breeds.

This diminutive cat can have either a medium-long or short coat, and like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, can occur in a rainbow of colors and patterns. “As its namesake suggests, the Toybob is a small-sized cat with a kinked bobbed tail.”1 With a snuggly personality, the Toybob is affectionate and loves lap time with its owners, as well as lots of interactive play.

A Little History, If You Please!

These charming little cats “originated in Russia in 1983".1 As the story goes, “Elena Krasnichenko found a stray cat that looked like a Siamese with a short, kinked tail. Two years later, Elena’s mother took in a seal-point female with a curled bobtail.”3 After breeding them, one of the resulting progeny, a male named Kutciy, was entered in his first cat show in 1989; he was mistaken for a kitten.3 A judge from “the World Cat Federation (Europe) named this small cat a ‘Toybob.’ Development of the breed continued over the next few decades as breeders expanded the gene pool and introduced new colors and patterns.”3