Save Toby

» see savetoby.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

save toby was the kind of thing english-language news picked up because it slotted cleanly into an outrage segment. i heard about it years later, well after the fact, when someone linked to the archived page in a listicle about early-2000s web hoaxes. in january 2005 i was a computer engineering student in ankara mostly reading donanimhaber and playing counter-strike at the neighborhood internet cafe. an american page threatening to cook a rabbit did not cross the language barrier at the time.

what the site actually was: a single-page appeal from two anonymous webmasters going by james and brian. they had a real pet rabbit named toby. they posted photos of him. they announced that unless they received $50,000 in donations by 30 june 2005, they would eat him. the page provided a paypal link, a merchandise store, and a set of recipes for how they intended to prepare him. the tone was flat and deliberate, no wink at the audience.

this was the kind of pitch that could only land in the paypal-donation era of 2005. the site was picked up almost immediately by animal rights groups, by mainstream press looking for an outrage segment, by every rss-feed blog looking for something to link. it ran a segment on nbc nightly news in april 2005. by the time the deadline arrived they had collected somewhere over $24,000 in donations plus merchandise, no rabbit had been harmed, and the deadline quietly slid.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

save toby sat in the shock-hoax lineage that ran through the late 1990s and early 2000s, next to rotten.com and ogrish, built on the same wager that a lot of people would click and pay attention if the premise was upsetting enough. save toby was cleaner than most because it did not actually show anything, it just threatened to. the whole apparatus was the threat plus a paypal button.

snopes and later coverage settled on the read that this was a hoax modeled on the national lampoon "if you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog" cover from 1973. the creators kept insisting in interviews that they were serious. hosting company go daddy declined to remove the site after animal rights complaints, arguing there was nothing illegal about a person threatening to eat their own rabbit.

~ the day it died ~

the site limped through 2005 and 2006 on residual traffic. deadlines got extended, new merchandise dropped, donation totals ticked up but never anywhere near the $50,000 target. in december 2006 bored.com bought the domain and posted a note saying toby had been saved by their purchase price. the story lost its remaining oxygen and the page went into flat maintenance.

what remains is a fossil of the specific moment when a personal-brand paypal button plus a shock premise could pull in five figures and a slot on nightly news. later the same energy went into the encyclopedia dramatica archives and eventually the streaming-donation subscribe-star era. save toby was one of the last hoax pages that could still generate national news coverage on its own without going through a platform.

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