The snow leopard staring out of everyone’s timeline this week is real. Its face is not. The viral “paws at you” picture is a genuine zoo photo of a snow leopard named Himmel that someone ran through AI tools, giving the big cat the wide eyes and face of a famous internet house cat.
By Tuesday, October 27, one version on X had passed 1.4 million views and around 144,700 likes in roughly a day. A day later the official Epic Games Store account joined in with its own “paws at you hop online” edit, which drew more than 950,000 views in about 14 hours.
Where the picture really came from
The untouched photo dates back to May 25, 2024. An X user shared it after a trip to Ishikawa Zoo in Nomi, a city in western Japan, and it slowly gathered more than 718,000 views and 25,000 likes over the next two years. It also turned up on Reddit’s snow leopard community in March 2025.
Nothing much happened until this month. Some time in October 2026, the image was altered with AI so that Himmel wore the exaggerated eyes and face of Mei Mei, also known as Tole Tole Cat, a pet who became an online star back in 2023.
How the meme spread in one week
The timeline is short and fast:
- October 23: the earliest known post pairing Himmel with Mei Mei’s face appears on X, captioned “forming a collection.” It passes 156,600 views and 20,000 likes in six days.
- October 25: an Instagram post uses it to poke fun at the way friends nag each other to play video games, collecting more than 34,600 likes. TikTok compilations and fan redraws follow.
- October 27: two X posts break out, one topping 1.4 million views and another, a text-chat screenshot captioned “True friendship,” passing 914,000 views in a day.
- October 28: gamers adopt it to pester people into joining matches, and Epic Games Store posts its own take.
The caption is older than the picture. “*Paws at you*” comes from asterisk-style roleplay writing, the same family as “*nuzzles*” and “*pounces*.” Put a pleading, too-cute cat face on a large predator and the joke writes itself: the image now stands in for that one friend who will not stop asking.
The real animal behind the edit
The joke works partly because real snow leopards look nothing like a begging house cat. The species, Panthera uncia, lives in the high mountains of Central and South Asia, from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to southern Siberia and Mongolia, usually at 3,000 to 4,500 meters.
They are solitary and elusive, most active at dawn and dusk, with broad paws and thick tails built for cold, steep ground. Conservationists who study the species say the cats are not known to be aggressive toward humans.
They are also scarce. The species is listed as Vulnerable, with fewer than 10,000 mature animals estimated worldwide, and conservation researchers put the wild population at somewhere between 3,920 and 6,390. Even at the top of that range, the 1.4 million views on one meme post means more than 200 views for every snow leopard thought to be left in the wild.
The original, unedited photo of Himmel was taken at Ishikawa Zoo on or before May 25, 2024, nearly two and a half years before the AI version made the cat famous.
Further reading
Image: kallerna, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
