A Lansing cat has a Guinness World Record for having ten extra toes.
Cats usually have 18 toes in total, but Delaney Henderson's cat, Toby, has 28, seven on each paw. He’s what’s known as a polydactyl cat.
"I think they're so cute, but for like a person who's never seen a polydactyl cat, it's like kind of freaky to look at, like, I'm not gonna lie," Henderson said.
One of his paws looks like two fused together. Another looks more like a heart. One of his thumbs curls over his foot like a human hand. His name, Toby, is short for Toe Beans.
Toby is not Henderson’s first polydactyl fur baby.
Her other cat Connie has a few extra toes, so she didn’t expect anything different when she saw a posting for Toby from a Michigan rescue around two years ago.
"It just said polydactyl. It didn't say anything crazy about how many toes he had," she explained.
But his look didn’t phase her. For Henderson, Toby is a normal cat, most of the time.
"He's got 30 claws, so that's been more just of a headache because he hates getting his claws trimmed, and it's like a lot of work."
When she adopted him, she learned another cat in Canada, had earned the record in the early 2000s for most toes on a cat. That cat had 28, just like Toby.
So, Henderson reached out to Guinness and applied to tie the record. Toby officially earned the title last year.
His achievement has been going viral online recently.
"It's just like been like an Instagram craze. I think my mom saw it on Facebook. So, like randomly, our friends will just be scrolling through like their feeds, and they just see our cat pop up, which is insane," Henderson said.
The real question is: has the fame gone to Toby’s head?
"We have some really cute pictures of him like staring at his world record, but obviously he can't read, so he's just like normal," she said.
"A lot of people come over and they, like, want to like touch and look at his feet, and I think he's getting a little self-conscious of them."
And what about Connie?
"Connie doesn't know either that she should be jealous of her little brother," Henderson joked.
Henderson says she has her hands full with both Connie and Toby, and their extra toes, so she doesn’t see any more cats in her immediate future.
But she wouldn’t mind if her next pet also had a few extra toes.
