BREAKING NEWS: Hello Kitty is NOT a cat!

Everything we thought to be true about the world has turned out to be one big lie! Well, everything we thought to be true about Hello Kitty, at least.

When a University of Hawaii anthropologist student Christine R. Yano was curating a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum (sounds interesting!), she was corrected, quite firmly, by the creators of the icon. She explains:

"That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty.”

But wait – she has whiskers! And cat ears, and a cute little cat nose! And her name is KITTY for crying out loud! Surely just because she doesn’t walk on all fours we can’t disregard all these other tell-tale signs that Hello Kitty is quite clearly a cat?

Well, the creators have spoken, so we suppose we may just take their word for it. What does this mean for Peppa Pig, we wonder? Or Mickey Mouse, for that matter?

We just don’t know what to believe anymore.