Animal text art covers every creature on the keyboard except cats, which have a page of their own. The bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is the star: its round ears are a single phonetic letter, so it stays compact enough for a username or the end of a sentence. Around it sit the rabbit (•ㅅ•), dogs like U・ᴥ・U, the fish ><(((º> swimming right and <º)))>< swimming left, the chick (・Θ・), a bat, a spider, a crab and the Japanese squid くコ:彡. Four pieces here run over several lines, the classic (\_/) bunny, the sleeping rabbit, an owl and a duck. Those need a fixed-width font to keep their shape, so paste them into a code block. Everything else works anywhere plain text does.
22 Animal Text Art to Copy
The bear is built from phonetic letters
ʕ and ʔ are not brackets. ʕ is U+0295, the IPA letter for the voiced pharyngeal fricative, a throat sound in Arabic, and ʔ is the glottal stop. Their curl happens to look like an ear. The snout ᴥ is U+1D25, LATIN LETTER AIN, added in Unicode 4.0 in 2003. Since all three are letters, the bear survives fields that strip symbols.
Fish, squid and other one-liners
><> is about the smallest animal you can type, and it is also the name of an esoteric programming language. Longer fish add body segments, ><(((º>, and flip direction with <º)))><. The squid くコ:彡 is usually credited to Japanese text boards: the hiragana く is the pointed tip of its body and 彡 the trailing tentacles. Those survive any app, since they never depend on line breaks or spacing.
Keeping the multi-line bunny upright
The stacked (\_/) bunny, the owl {o,o} and the duck are drawn on a grid, and that grid only exists in a monospaced font where every character takes the same width. In a proportional font the underscore is wider than the parenthesis, so the ears drift off the head. Discord, Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp all have a monospace mode, usually reached by wrapping the art in triple backticks, and that is where these belong. We pad every line to the same length, so a trailing space or two is expected. Instagram comments and TikTok captions offer no monospace option, so use a one-line bear or fish there instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ and how do I type it?▼
It is a bear face. The ears are IPA letters ʕ and ʔ, the snout is ᴥ, and the eyes are bullets. No standard keyboard has those keys, so the easiest way is to copy it once and save it as a text replacement shortcut on your phone.
Why does the multi-line bunny fall apart when I paste it?▼
The app is showing it in a proportional font, or it has joined the lines. Paste the art inside a code block (triple backticks on Discord, Slack and WhatsApp) so every character takes equal width and the line breaks stay where they are.
Why is there no cat on this page?▼
Cats have so many text forms that they have their own Cat Text Art page, with ᓚᘏᗢ, (=^･ω･^=) and twenty more. This page covers the rest of the animal kingdom so the two sets do not repeat each other.
