Toby Montana....the bravest cat I have ever known

Toby Montana Roberts went over the Rainbow Bridge today.

Today we said goodbye to one of the bravest cats I know....Toby Montana Roberts.

I met Toby while I was working at Kellogg Pet Medical Center in 2006.  If my memory serves me correctly, he was brought into the clinic after his front right paw was caught in a bear trap.  A neighbor of the owners had found him and brought him in for Dr. Broaddus to take care of him.

After a while, the infection in his leg was so bad that Dr. Andy had to operate and remove his leg.

Then he was a "clinic cat" for a while.  I would watch him around the clinic, and I was smitten!

At the time we owned two dogs and three cats.  We were not even thinking about getting another pet.  But I came home one day from work, and had a conversation with Paul, convincing him that we needed to be Toby's caretakers....because they were not going to give these three legged cat to just anyone.

So we brought Toby home to our house, and he has lived almost 13 years with us.  But today it was time for us to say goodbye to this brave boy.  Over the past few years, Toby developed diabetes, and he was not getting around as well as he used to, so we made that hard decision to say goodbye.

My favorite memory of Toby was one day in our backyard.  I was glad I observed him doing this, or I don't think I would have believed it.  The fact that Toby was missing one of his front legs never slowed him down!!  I was sitting out in our backyard, and Toby was out there observing some birds circling around our backyard.  I think Toby was feeling the rhythm of the birds, and was figuring out when they were coming close to the top of the fence.  Because, before I knew it, he had jumped from the ground to the top of our six foot fence, took his remaining front paw, grabbed a bird, put it in his mouth, and then jumped back down into the backyard, and proceeded to finish off his prey.  I remember thinking afterward that I had just observed an episode of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" right in my own backyard.

Toby would stand down to nothing...no dogs or no other cats.  I remember another time a neighborhood cat pinned him under a bush in the front yard.  Paul rescued him and the other cat had punctured him somewhere on his head, so he started bleeding profusely.  Paul scooped him up and drove him right down to Dr. Andy.  Fortunately, it was just a superficial wound on his head that bled a lot.

Once Toby was diagnosed with diabetes he really started slowing down.  I think it took a lot out of him.  We would administer insulin twice a day.  We would take a blood glucose reading every couple of months or so.  But he was just never the same.  This spring and summer, he really started losing his strength and we knew it was time to tell our brave boy goodbye.

Goodbye Toby Montana.....Mr. Tobes.  You had a special place here in our home and the place in our hearts will always be filled by the memory of you.