About

Cat Owl, also known as Cowl, Meowl or Chinese Cat, refers to a Photoshop of an owl with a cat head, originally created in 2013 by Weibo user zhumaokele.

Origin

On April 27th, 2013, user zhumaokele shared a post on Chinese social media Weibo with the caption “Help! Where did you get those cute little owl eyes _~~~@瓜皮的id酱” (machine translated), depicting the popular cat Melonpi, dubbed "China’s Cutest Cat" as a cat owl hybrid creature. The joke is that “owl” in Chinese (猫头鹰) literally means cat-headed eagle.

This image was one of a series of 4 images where zhumaokele would edit cat heads onto owls.

Spread

On May 29th, 2013, Reddit user u/electrical_outlet posted a collage of the 4 cat owl hybrids in the r/funny subreddit with the caption “Found on Facebook: Owls with cat heads are just a little bit creepy/funny”. The image had gained over 2K likes and 176 comments.

On March 6th, 2016, Twitter account @9GAG posted the same collage but with the caption “MEOWLS”, gaining over 2K likes.

Modern Era

In 2024, the image would once again become a popular meme, often paired with the #meowl or #catowlhybrid hashtags.

On February 26th, 2024, Tiktok user @maheadfullofzig posted an edit of the image with the text “when she say shes going to touch u but you low key want that”, gaining 3.3M views and over 769.7K likes in over a year.
https://www.tiktok.com/@maheadfullofzig/video/7339998920879131936

On August 28th, 2024, Tiktok user @dusekkarkisser posted an edit of the image with the caption “"stop posting the meowl" meowl”, gaining 1.7M views and over 328.7K likes in 8 months.
https://www.tiktok.com/@dusekkarkisser/video/7408172928317017349

On October 22th, 2024, Youtube user AZALI with 264K subscribers posted a short video of the image entitled “cat owl”, with eerie music playing in the background, gaining over 70K views in 5 months. A follow-up video entitled misplaced, where the cat is seemingly absent from the image was uploaded 3 months later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AhIdFW7Qwc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scXbzgH9qhY

On January 15th, 2025 Tiktok user @satorugojo____0 posted an edit of the image with the famous Eye of Rah edit, gaining 985.2K views and over 217.9K likes in 3 months.
https://www.tiktok.com/@satorugojo____0/video/7460222942107012398

From being used in so many memes of different formats, the Cat Owl image ended up getting cropped, squashed and its quality deteriorated. Below is a comparison of the original image and the one most often used in memes.

Various Examples

https://www.tiktok.com/@drinkcept/video/7406422786840874271
https://www.tiktok.com/@schokocrossaint2/video/7439985821765192978
https://www.tiktok.com/@im..reel/video/7403559368379223339