About

Half Cat refers to a digitally altered image of a cat with two legs walking down a street. Since it's earliest appearance in February 2010, the cat has been used in a variety of image macros, parody posters and surreal memes.

Origin

On February 14th, 2010, the blog eBooks Online^[1] published a post entitled "Top 10 Photos of the Week," which included an apparent photograph of a white cat with two legs walking along a street with the caption "The longer you stare, the weirder it gets" (shown below).

Spread

On February 21st, 2010, Lowyat.net^[2] forum member enjoice posted the image in a thread titled "Secretly took few pictures at CTY Aquarium". On May 8th, 2013, the British news site The Independent published a story revealing that Reddit and Imgur users had tracked down the original picture of the cat walking along a street in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (shown below).^[3]

On September 15th, 2013, the Half Cat YouTube channel uploaded a documentary about the image (shown below).

Sinko Peso

In 2018, the cat began seeing use in surreal and ironic memes, often in commentary on the strangeness of modern memes. On March 22nd, 2018, Redditor mBBurns posted a Memes Then, Memes Now image macro comparing the Happy Cat "I Can Has Cheezburger?" meme to a picture of Half Cat with the caption "When you walking" (shown below). Within one month, the post gained over 1,300 points (96% upvoted) on /r/memes.^[4]

This iteration of the character began spreading in Portuguese memes under the name "Sinko Peso."

A Facebook page dedicated to "Sinko Peso" gained over 4,500 likes in less than two weeks.^[5] Variations on the meme were posted there and by Portuguese-speaking users on various other social media sites (examples shown below).

A review of the meme posted by TheDracerGx on June 24th gained over 28,000 views in less than a day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References