Hosico

Hosico is a Scottish Straight with a thick golden-cream coat, enormous round amber eyes and a permanently slightly startled expression, and he has been one of the most-followed cats on the internet since 2016. His Moscow-based owner started photographing him as a kitten, and the account grew into an audience of millions across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.

The appeal is partly the look — Hosico has the round-faced, wide-eyed proportions that trigger the same responses in humans as an infant's face, a phenomenon ethologists call the baby schema — and partly the gentle format of the content. There is no drama and very little narrative. Hosico sits in a bowl. Hosico inspects a new box. Hosico is groomed, or eats his dinner, or naps in a sunbeam. The whole enterprise is aggressively low-stakes, and that turned out to be exactly what an enormous audience wanted.

He is often confused with a Scottish Fold, but Hosico is a Scottish Straight — the straight-eared variety of the same breed, which does not carry the cartilage mutation responsible for the folded ear and the painful skeletal disease that comes with it. That distinction has been made repeatedly by animal welfare campaigners who point to Hosico as the ethical way to enjoy the breed's look, and it is a genuinely useful piece of public education embedded in a cat that mostly sits in bowls.

His resemblance to a bowl of ramen became a running joke early on and eventually a piece of merchandising, and the "Hosico ramen" images remain among his most reproduced. Now approaching his second decade, he continues to post, and continues to sit in things.