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The Toybob cat is often regarded as one of the smallest cat breeds, and it is worth mentioning that the breed is not a miniaturised version of an established cat breed. The Toybob is a small-tailed cat naturally native to Russia, and has existed there for more than three decades. The Toybob can be found in all colours and has a short or semi-long coat. The short-haired Toybob is more common at the moment as not all professional cat associations have approved the long-haired Toybob yet. The Toybob cat was first documented in the Rostov region of Russia in 1983, when Mrs. Elena Krasnichenko adopted a stray seal-tipped cat from outside her home. According to her accounts, this cat closely resembled the traditional Siamese cat (Applehead), except for its shortened and twisted tail. Toybob: small cats with a big heart
The Toybob cat is often considered one of the smallest cat breeds, and it is worth mentioning that the breed is not a miniaturised version of an established cat breed. The Toybob is a small-tailed cat naturally native to Russia, and has existed there for more than three decades.
The Toybob can be found in all colours and has a short or semi-long coat. The short-haired Toybob is more common at the moment as not all professional cat associations have approved the long-haired Toybob yet.
First generation Toybob and Kutciy (right). Photo by E. Krasnichenko. Published in TICA Trend, Vol. 38, No. 1
The Toybob cat was first documented in the Rostov region of Russia in 1983, when Mrs Elena Krasnichenko adopted a stray seal-tipped cat from outside her home. According to her, this cat looked very much like the traditional Siamese cat (Applehead), except for its shortened and twisted tail.
She later crossed it with another female domestic shorthair with a seal-tail, and in 1988, the breeding of these two cats produced an unusually small, kink-tailed kitten named “Kutciy”, which became one of the founding cats of the breed Krasnichenko called “Skif-Thai-Don” (also known in its longer form, Skif-Thai-Toy-Don).
In the late 1990s, the Toybob became scarce, and a breeder in the Ural region of Russia, Alexis Abramchuk of the Si-Savat cattery, began to expand the breed’s limited gene pool by adding domestic cats. When Si-Savat discontinued its Toybob breeding programme, local Ural breeder Natalya Fedyaeva of the Little Angel cattery acquired from Abramchuk, a small “Gavrila” male elsewhere, two females, all three of the Skif-Thai-Don line, and began her restoration of the breed.
Fedyaeva had observed that cats of very similar phenotype to the Toybob were seen living locally around barns and streets in that region. Some of these native cats were also small in size and had curled or folded tails, but were seen in different colours and patterns than the seal-tipped.
Fedyaeva, along with other local breeders, continued to expand the initially small gene pool of the Toybob cat by adding those found in domestic cats, as well as in other breeds of similar phenotype. Fedyaeva began to refer to her cats as “Scyth-Toy-Bob” to differentiate them from the Skif-Thai-Don and exhibited them at the World Cat Federation (WCF) in its “Unrecognised Breed” category.