Last November, when Emil, a 40-year-old television executive, awoke in his Midtown apartment to find his new kitten, Pugsley, staring at him with a peculiar expression on his fluffy face, he didn’t think twice about snapping a pic and posting it to Instagram.
What he didn’t expect was the level of attention that photo would attract.
The cat quickly garnered nearly 100 “likes” and dozens of comments. Suddenly, strangers were viewing Emil’s profile. Emil and his girlfriend Julia soon decided that Pugsley needed an Instagram account of his own.
“I didn’t want crazy cat people all up in my grill, so to speak,” Emil says.
Eight months later, the 11-month-old exotic shorthair has nearly 12,000 followers on the social media site with the handle @pugsleykitty.
Like longtime Internet sensations Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, Pugsley’s appearance straddles the strange line between adorable and amiss: His fluffy coat is cuddly, his expressions are delighfully dubious but there’s something a bit off about his low, wide-set eyes, which almost appear to be upside-down on his face.
When Emil and Julia first started looking for a pet in the fall of 2013, they were expecting to get a low-maintenance house cat (the couple declined to give their last names to avoid becoming known as “the crazy cat people” at work). Julia, 36, a global commerce operator in the beauty industry, spotted Pugsley on a breeder’s website.
“I saw Pugsley’s face and told Emil that he was the one,” recalls Julia. “It was love at first sight.”
It wasn’t long before the couple boarded a plane to Florida to bring the blue-eyed boy home, but they soon learned that Pugsley was anything but ordinary — he had a special knack for hamming it up in front of the camera. “As soon as you pull out a phone, he sticks his face in the lens,” Emil jokes. “He’s really into the attention. We don’t have to hold him or make him pose for the pictures.”
Cuteness aside, Pugsley owes much of his success to his humans for writing wry captions in his imaginary voice, such as “no … Those are not traces of wet food on my face.”
“We try to imagine what he’s thinking based on what he was doing,” Emil says.
The rising Internet star currently divides his time between NYC and a house in Lloyd Harbor, LI. His owners suspect he prefers the latter.
“There are always big bugs outside the window buzzing…he goes bonkers,” says Emil. Not that he’s very intimidating — he doesn’t even know how to meow. “He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out,” says Julia.
The kitty also doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea about his celebrity or his charmed life, with his two homes, growing fanbase and a monthly subscription to a service for boxes of treats and toys.
“I don’t think that cat knows much,” Emil says with a laugh. “As Julia has taken to saying as of late, ‘Cat, you don’t know how good you got it!’ ”