Four-year-old Fedya, a gray rescued cat from Russia, has become a social media sensation thanks to his funny permanently startled look.

When Fedya’s owner, Natalya Zhdanova, found him in her backyard in 2020, she had no idea he would one day become an Instagram star with over 300,000 followers. At the time, she wasn’t even sure he would survive. He had been born with a coordination issue and struggled to move around, but as he grew, his condition improved, and before long he was behaving like a normal cat, although he didn’t really look like one. Natalya claims she didn’t really notice his unusual looks, but her friends always seemed amused by Fedya’s constantly startled appearance, and she reluctantly started posting photos of him on social media. The rest, as they say, is history.

Photo: Instagram

“I didn’t notice that he had any unusual appearance – he just seemed cute and funny to me,” Natalya said. “But my friends and acquaintances told me that this cat must be shown to the world.”

The world loved Fedya, and Natalya quickly realized that his adorable looks made a lot of people’s days better, so she continued uploading funny photos and videos of her spoiled pet.

Fedya the cat first made international news headlines in 2021, at the start of his Instagram journey. He had ‘only’ 36,000 fans at the time, a number that has since ballooned to 314,000.

It’s unclear why Fedya has this unusual facial expression all the time, but his owner suspects that it is due to some genetic defect or a result of physical trauma. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to bother the feline at all. It’s what makes him special, and the main reason for his social media success.

“Fedya, you are not like everyone else and that’s great,” one of his fans wrote on Instagram.

“That face makes him/her even more adorable,” someone else wrote.

 

For more animal influencers, check out Lyznia, the world’s fattest cat, and Ghost, the singing samoyed.