A Snopes article had a person saying they saw a disclaimer that savetoby.com would be a joke. I have gone to the Wayback Machine and checked the exact date the person said they saw the disclaimer, and THE DISCLAIMER IS NOT THERE. So was Toby a real bunny and was he killed? Or was the story invented? I guess we will never actually know if Toby was real.
For those who don't know what savetoby.com was:
It was a site made somewhere in 2004 (?) that said the anonymous person behind the site has found a rabbit under his porch, soaking wet and named him Toby. The story would say that if he didn't get 50k dollars in donations until a set date, he will eat Toby. The site had recipies, a store with merchandise, a gallery with pictures of Toby, and more.
Later, after the site was tried to be shut down, the creator made a book called "Only you can save Toby!" and said that if 100k copies of that book weren't sold by Thanksgiving 2000-something, he will eat Toby at Thanksgiving. The book was barely sold, and by that time, the domain was bought by other company saying they saved Toby. The truth stays unknown. Nobody knows what happened to Toby. Unless the creator, if still living would come out and tell us the bare truth. But he can't be trusted.
I did blur out segments of the last picture cause they might be considered uh, NSFW as they contain raw meat and blood.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050209034248/http://www.savetoby.com/
Source: r/InternetMysteries · by /u/VloTheDev