Massive rat in China
A gentlman known only as Mr Xian nabbed this massive six-pound rat on a street in Fuzhhou, China. From The Telegraph:
Giant rat caught in China"I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!" he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene.
The local forestry unit in the city identified the nightmarish creature as a bamboo rat from initial photographs, but said that it would need to examine the rat more closely before making a final identification.
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In other news, Tiny Chinese Man Eaten By Large Rat?
Take that, NYC!
It's a real-life R.O.U.S.
It looks a lot like a nutria.
Yoink!
Not to cry hoax, but the rat is closer to the camera than the guy, and his hand isn't visible for relative scale.
You'd be amazed how much proportions can be distorted by certain lenses.
This could just be a normal big rat...
Or it could be Garth Marenghi's prophecy coming true…
Aw, he didn't find it in the quartermaster's stores!
..."and there was a voice going, 'HOLY JESUS! What are these things!!!'"
Seeing this really puts tortures from the Spanish Inquistion in perspective. I always wondered how many rats you'd need for that iron box on someone's head... as long as it's one of these, your answer is "one". You would need a gun to kill something this big. Damn.
I thought there were giant rats only in Sumatra (or is that Sinatra?)! But then we're all bozos on this bus.
It does appear to be the size of a small cat. But then again, so is a muskrat, which any kid from the suburban Midwest would be familiar with, and so is a nutria, which any kid from the Deep South would be familiar with. I looked up the bamboo rat, and it does not look like this. THIS RAT HAS WEBBED HIND FEET. The wikipedia says that nutria have been introduced to Asia, so that is probably what that rat is.
I mean, what Blueelm said.
That night, the man was attacked by four bipedal turtles, who were wearing colored masks and weilding a variety of hand-to-hand weapons. The turtles proceeded to take the rat down into the sewers.
Fleas the size of rats, and rats the size of cats...
yes, but how does it taste?
@TJ S
hahaha, you make me feel better about knowing these things exist. I'll just try to pretend this was a benevolent sensei rat, and not one that would try to eat my face.
Also, for those who doubt the size, the Telegraph article says the tail alone was 12 inches. A two and a have foot rat is more than big enough for my tastes.
they train similarly-sized ones in Africa to find landmines: http://herorat.org/
"Burn it" says my cat, "burn the whole damn city."
Now imagine the size of the local rat snakes...
Don't shoot them, it'll only piss em off.
I saw a similar sized rat being executed in a market in the Philippines. Some merchants caught it in a pot, and transferred it into a plastic bag. Then one raised the bag high over his head. The rat scratched a hole through the bag and stretched out its limb for dear life as the merchant slammed it into the alleyway pavement. The rat's paw lay in a pool of blood that seeped through that hole it scratched out.
Did they discover a mysterious white liquid oozing from the ground in that part of China?
#!2 FTW!
#6: "Not to cry hoax, but the rat is closer to the camera than the guy, and his hand isn't visible for relative scale."
It's definitely exaggerated. The summary says the rat is 6 pounds. That'd be a very small cat. The smaller of my two cats is a pretty average sized adult American tabby, and he weighs twice that.
This looks like a big muskrat to me, don't nutria have orange teeth?
i saw a rat that looked to be that big swimming in the water in florence. we would do regular walking tours everyday i was there, and i saw the rat all the time. the tail was massive.
Poor rat. "nightmarish creature" remark reflects our attitude towards nature. Barbarism.
Yes, there are observed instances of some rat sub-species developing what we called "the goldfish bowl effect" Which is explained as "a goldfish grows to the size of it's tank." In some urban ecosystems apparently the Rat can grow to the limits of the smallest openings it needs to traverse. No, they can't eat a rebar filled concrete wall -YET. But in case where there are wall penetrations for services etc- those become that upper limit factor. a several inch diameter hole thus allows a several pound rattie. Which might echo the words of a suicidal parrot. "Here kitty kitty..."
It does have orange teeth. Christ, I'm going to cryptomundo.
I've seen rats that big. In the 70's, I went to India with my parents and we spent our first night in the Bombay train station and I saw what at first I thought were raccoons, ugly ones, walking on the girders. After a while they came down onto the ground and started walking around the sleeping peopleand I could tell by the tails that they were rats. One guy was awake and just kinda shooed one away when it got too close, like it was no big deal,and I'm think WTF!?! These things had to have been close to 4 feet from the tip of the nose to the end of it's tail, needless to say, I didn't sleep much that first night.
...and ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes...
Strangely, this makes me want to write a children's story.
"I did it!" said the man, "I caught a rat the size of a cat! It fought. It bit. But I held on tight, and I caught it!"
... I never said it would be a *good* story. ;)
Looks like that rat had a very good year...last year, that is.
It looks like a Rhizomys sumatrensis, or a Sumatra bamboo rat, also known just as the large bamboo rat, and they do get as large as that - if the tail is a foot long as reported in the Telegraph. I've seen them in Malaysia, but they are not supposed to be in Fujian, which has a much smaller variety of bamboo rat found locally, so that's probably why Mr. Xian was so surprised. Maybe the rat hitched a ride in some produce that came from southern Asia.
see:
http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/resources/Grzimek_mammals/Rats_Others/Rhizomys_sumatrensis.jpg/view.html
He stole the pointy kitty!
Mmmmm... DINNER!!
Rodents of unusual size? I don't think they exist.
you call that a rat? its tiny!! In Africa we have real rats...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Grand_aulacode_male.jpg
sigh, so many happy memories of The Giant Rat of Sumatra... "ARRR! Get in this barrel and we'll do it hurricane style!' (you remember Stinkin' Orlov?)
hmmph,most remarkable, Sea bass:
"T. swinderianus is one of the most preferred meats in Africa and it can be more expensive than lamb, chicken, beef, or pork (National Research Council, 1991). It has been sold in Ghana markets for almost twice as much as beef and pork. In one African market, about 200,000 kg, which is worth about $220,000 U.S., was sold in a year’s time (Fitzinger, 1997). Asibey (1999) believes that if more research was done to find the most efficient way to breed T. swinderianus, then these animals would be the solution to Africa's protein shortage."
T. swinderianus
I may have had that for dinner. Wasn't bad at all.
Let's do it up right, shall we?
And in the death
As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare
The shutters lifted in inches in Temperance Building
High on Poacher's Hill
And red mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City
No more big wheels
Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats
And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes
Coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers
Like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love-Me Avenue
Ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now legwarmers
Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald
Any day now
The Year of the Diamond Dogs
"This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide!"
Dammit.
The chipmunks came out two days ago, the first sign of spring.
The hawk just got one.
Dammit!
Go for the freaking red squirrels that chew holes in the house, willya?
Chipmunk. DAMMIT!!