Meet Toby – best known resident of Lakepoint

Ciara O’Hara

One of Lakepoint’s most famous residents is a cat named Toby. Friendly and curious, he loves meeting new neighbours and discovering what’s on the menu at their houses, despite being well cared for at home. Toby regularly roams all over the estate and at least once a week, a post goes up on the residents’ Facebook group asking if anyone knows who owns him.

Recently, Toby’s travels have taken him into Mullingar town centre. In April, he was spotted in Harbour Place Shopping Centre and made his way to Nuts and Grains, who shared a photo on social media, alerting Toby’s owners to his whereabouts. The next day, he was back in Harbour Place again.

That isn’t the furthest Toby has wandered. He was born in Cork and came to Mullingar as a kitten. Toby’s owner, Gabriela Chechova, who is originally from Czech, spotted him online. “I got him as a small kitten, only two months old. There was an advertisement, I think on Facebook, but it was in a Czech and Slovak group. And I always wanted the Russian , which is full grey. And it’s such a nice cat but it’s so expensive. I saw the advertisement… and they were mixed probably because he has some white into him. And I said, ‘I need to get this kitten.’ They said, ‘But we are living in Cork.’ And I said, ‘Jesus, I am not going to drive for him!’ And they said, ‘We are actually going to Dublin to the airport with my mother so I could meet you in Kildare’.”

Toby has been living with Gabriela, her fiancée Peter Finnegan, and their children Ryan, Ariana and Archie for six years now. He fitted in to the family straight away. “He is totally fine with kids. Really gentle. He wouldn’t do anything to them but if he really doesn’t like something, he would tell them,” says Gabi. Toby also gets on well with the family dogs, Chase and Bailey, and often sleeps with them.

As Toby grew, so did his adventures, and they took him to Petitswood and even Greenpark Meadows. Gabriela says he is: “All the time wandering. He followed me and Ariana to playschool all the time; he’s like a dog! And then I got him castrated. I thought it would stop but it never stopped… I think anyone who feeds him in the house, he stays with them for as long as they feed him.”

Even though he frequently strays, thanks to social media, Gabriela and Peter always find him. “He is always coming and going… he is never missing that much. He always comes for his food and he goes out and he’ll come back again… when he is missing a few days, I know he is in someone’s house,” says Gabriela.

Peter tells the Westmeath Examiner that, “Cara across the road, she went away for the day, and Sarah, one of the neighbours who lives across the road, came walking down the road and she said, ‘Peter, your cat’s in Cara’s house and she’s gone away.’ I said, ‘He’s not my cat; he’s Gabi’s cat!’ He went to the toilet on her couch, so that was an awkward conversation at the door!”

Peter mentions another neighbour who hated cats: “She was away and Toby came in the open window and he was sleeping on her bed, and she nearly got a heart attack because she walked upstairs and saw Toby. An estate agent was trying to sell the house, and he was bringing people in and Toby was asleep on her bed.”

One of their neighbours was vacuuming and as she was unplugging the hoover, she saw Toby asleep near the socket. She didn’t know how he had got in or how long he had been there. A few days later, the same neighbour was going away for a week. After leaving and locking the house, she realised she had forgotten something. When she went back inside, she noticed Toby asleep on the couch. Because the couch is grey, he had blended in with it.

He loves meeting new people and isn’t afraid of cars either, but there have been times when that has got Toby into trouble. Earlier this year, he was away for five days and when he returned, his whiskers had been cut off. Gabriela thinks the culprit must have been a child or a teenager, as she doesn’t think an adult would be “so cruel”, especially as whiskers are essential to cats and “everyone knows it’s their GPS”.

When he was a year old, Toby was hit by a car and Peter found him lying on the side of the road. “I was dying of a cold here and I was watching Man. United. And it was half-time and I said, ‘I’m going to go for whiskey. I need a hot whiskey or something.’ Coming back into Lakepoint, I see grey and white on the road. He was half-dead. I wrapped him in a bag and tinfoil to try and keep the heat in him. Then Emma, who lives across the road, said to Gabi she has a friend who is a vet,” says Peter. Gabriela remembers: “She gave him some shot and then I went to the vet with him the next day… he had a dislocated jaw. So, he had an operation and they had to take one tooth out so that he could close his mouth.”

Although Gabriela and Peter don’t worry too much about Toby’s absences, they say it can be “embarrassing” because “people think we don’t care about him”.

“She took him to Kinnegad to get his jaw wired. We nursed him back to health. People think he’s not being looked after because he’s gone for so long… Cats are like that. If you feed him, he stays there,” says Peter.

Asked what’s next for Toby, Gabriela says, “I have no idea!”

In April, the couple went on holiday to York and got engaged while they were there. As well as messages of congratulations, they received several about Toby’s whereabouts, and friends joked that they should keep an eye out for him at the airport. “When we went away to England, there was like four or five [Facebook] posts of Toby being in different houses… I was always thinking that people already know him by now but there is always some new person who posts ‘Who is missing this cat?’, and then there is another 20 people tagging you… We don’t know all his adventures because we have no camera on him,” says Gabi, who would love to place a tracking device on Toby to see exactly where he goes.

Peter recalls a particularly strange event involving Toby and a few unlikely friends. “I came to the back door one day and there were four baby birds, starlings, at the back door, alive! He took them and brought them back here, right. So, I had to find out where – what do you do with birds, like? I can’t mind them! I found out there was an organisation for taking in animals, so I rang them but they said there was nobody around. So I had to drive to the other side of Navan to a bird sanctuary, to drop the birds off there. I had to sign papers and everything. They nearly vetted me… I said, ‘I’m only dropping them off.’ ‘It doesn’t matter; you still have to do it.’ So, I signed the papers. I got home. I went to go out the back door. What was there? Two more birds! So that’s six birds in total. I said, ‘I’m not going back there. Took me an hour to drive there. I was signing forms for half an hour and then an hour back.’ So, I phoned the woman again. She said, ‘Listen, keep hold of them for today.’ So, I met a girl in Tesco then and gave them to her.”

Gabriela and Peter are convinced Toby rescued the birds and was bringing them home to safety. “If he wants them for food or a trophy, he would kill them straight away,” says Gabriela.

Toby was neutered at around two years of age and the incident with the starlings occurred when he was approximately 18 months old. His behaviour has perplexed LeeAnne Maye, a veterinary nurse at Auburn Veterinary Hospital, and baffled her colleagues too. “This little cat, we had a great laugh about him. He sounds like such a little character… Everything they do revolves around their hunter instinct. We’re stumped on the fact that he didn’t kill them. It’s really unusual. If it was a female cat you’d think the mothering instinct had taken over… because they are amazing mothers as well. But it’s really unusual for a male especially unneutered. It’s usually about five, six months when sexual maturity hits and they get the proper male instinct,” says LeeAnne.

LeeAnne finds the distances of Toby’s journeys unusual too. “In towns, cats have less roaming area because of other cats, so their territory would be smaller because there’s so many other cats around. I think farm cats, you’d see it more. They can roam for miles because there’s fewer cats around. It does seem unusually far; unneutered males tend to roam a bit more.”

Gabriela thinks that Toby was following her car when he went to Harbour Place shopping centre. “I remember that day, that I was passing him by car. He knows the sound. I think he might follow us when I am driving the kids to school. I think that’s what he was doing… I think he is not happy with only being famous in Lakepoint; I think he wants to be famous in all of Mullingar!”

Peter has his own explanation for Toby’s unique character. “What I like about it is, it’s like he was human once. And I think he’s come back as a cat. Do you know? I kind of have that belief in reincarnation so I like to believe that he was human. And that’s why he loves people. Even though Peter claims he’s “not a cat person”, he says, “If you don’t like cats, or if you think you don’t like cats, you have to meet Toby … you’ll change your mind then.”