Longcat Was Real: The True Story of Shiro

Millions of people have seen this picture. A plain white cat, held up under the front legs, her body hanging down like a furry tube. Very few know her name was Shiro, or that the story most people tell about her gets the dates wrong.

Longcat is often described with the years 2005 to 2006. Those years mark when the internet discovered her, not her life. The real cat was born around 2002 and was still alive fourteen years after the edits began.

A skinny gray kitten in a jacket

In May 2002, in Japan, a man came home with a tiny kitten tucked inside his jacket. She was skinny and gray. As she grew healthy, her coat turned white, so the family named her Shiro, the Japanese word for white.

According to her owner, a woman who goes by Miiko online, Shiro was deaf, bold and mischievous, and she enjoyed soaking in the bath with her family.

The photo that started it

In 2004, Miiko had friends over. She picked Shiro up under the front legs, and the cat just kept going. Her body stretched down while her face stayed completely blank.

Miiko posted the photo to the cat board of Futaba Channel, a Japanese image-sharing forum. Users there called her Nobiiru-tan, roughly “little stretchy one,” and began editing her to look even longer.

How a Japanese cat became “Longcat”

On October 1, 2003, a 15-year-old in New York named Christopher Poole launched 4chan, an English-language site built as a counterpart to Futaba Channel. Shiro’s photo made the jump, and on 4chan’s random board she got the name the world knows: Longcat.

People replied to her picture saying “Longcat is long,” then stretched her into space. On September 16, 2006, the word Longcat was added to Urban Dictionary.

Tacgnol and the prophecy of Catnarok

In February 2007, someone posted a color-flipped version: a black cat with the same impossible length. Users named it Tacgnol, Longcat spelled backward. Within days they invented a prophecy that the two cats would meet in a final battle called Catnarok, after Ragnarok, the end of the world in Norse myth.

Was Shiro really that long?

A bit of both. Reports put her at about 25 and a half inches from head to toe. But the way she was held mattered just as much. A cat’s spine has about 53 bones, compared with 33 in a human, joined loosely with cushioned discs. Lift a relaxed cat under the front legs, and gravity pulls the whole body into a long, loose line.

A quiet life behind the meme

While the internet argued about Catnarok, Shiro lived quietly in Japan. On October 16, 2019, Pokémon fans noticed a new giant form of Meowth with a body so stretched that people immediately compared it to Longcat. That same year, her owner shared that Shiro, then 17, no longer climbed to high places but was taking it easy.

On September 20, 2020, the family found Shiro weak at home and rushed her to an animal hospital. She was too ill for X-rays and died that afternoon at about 18 and a half years old.