Hello Kitty fans are in shock after learning the global icon is not a cat

It has been a decidedly catastrophic week for Hello Kitty fans around the world.

The shocking revelation that the Japanese cartoon character is not a cat but a little British girl living in the suburbs of London has left millions of fans reeling.

Their sense of betrayal is understandable. For the past 40 years, fans have assumed Hello Kitty was a fancy feline. Even Hello Kitty experts — yes, they really exist — didn't know the truth until recently.

University of Hawaii anthropologist Christine Yano, who has spent years researching the Hello Kitty craze, told the Los Angeles Times that she was corrected by Sanrio, the Tokyo-based company that created Hello Kitty, when she described the cartoon character as a cat.

Yano apparently sent a written piece for an upcoming Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National University in Los Angeles to Sanrio for proofreading.

"I was corrected — very firmly," Yano was quoted as saying by the Los Angeles Times. "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."

It seems only a paw-full of Hello Kitty fans had actually bothered to read the feline’s back story, which describes her as a "happy little girl with a heart of gold" who "loves to bake."

But if Hello Kitty really isn't a cat, does that mean Snoopy, who walks on his hind legs, rides a skateboard and plays the saxophone, isn’t a dog?

Nope. According to this tweet Snoopy is still the real deal. Phew.

Such a debate about the identity of a famous cartoon character is unusual. It's normally reserved for Olympic mascots. Remember the 2012 London Olympics? More than two years after the event, people are still trying to work out what Wenlock and Mandeville represented. 

In the wake of the Hello Kitty uproar, Sanrio appeared to retreat from its earlier claims that the cartoon character was not a cat, but in doing so created further confusion.

This is what a company spokesperson told gaming news site Kotaku.

"Hello Kitty was done in the motif of a cat. It's going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat."

This Wall Street Journal interview with Sanrio left the issue more tangled than a hair ball. 

Our best guess is Hello Kitty is a hybrid cat/girl.