Welp. They say you always have one not farther away than 6 feet from you. Hopefully most won’t be this size!
Giant rat caught in a Stockholm kitchen. The animal was 40 cm (roughly 16") long --not counting the tail-- and weighed more than 1 kilo (2.2 lbs give or take). The bloody thing apparently chewed through wood and concrete to enter the space under the sink in the kitchen.
BBC news article here. Be warned – If you are scared of rats (or, generally, of any rodent of any type), do NOT click on that link. There are photos. Link protected under a spoiler tag
Peter: So the guy takes the dog into the vet. And the freakin’ vet tells him, get this, “It’s not a dog. It’s a rat.” A big, stinkin’ Mexican rat. True story.
Meg: Dad, that’s just an urban legend. **
Peter**: Hand to God. I’m telling you, it was a huge freakin’ rat. Five times as big as that guy’s steak.
Lois: Oh, Peter, that rat gets bigger every time you tell this story!
Quote:
However, scientists do believe they (rats) could eventually grow into the size of sheep, Dr Jan Zalasiewicz, of the University of Leicester in the UK, recently told the BBC.
There already are “rats” that size.
They are called capybaras and they live in South America.
Norway rats don’t get that big, my first thought is that it must be one of those African pouched rats that have been making their way into the pet trade.
It looks to be some type of pouched rat or perhaps a hybrid. A rat that large would be vulnerable to stray dogs, as well as raccoons,larger birds of prey and other wild life. There aren’t many evolutionary advantages to being large.
Not quite. The rat cage is probably a good eight feet away, on the other side of the room.
I’m going to show this to the next person who goes wide-eyed and asks me how my pets get to be so big. I keep a few critters around for company, and my (pudgy, lazy, spoiled) boys usually weigh about a pound, which is apparently huge for domesticated rats. You can still scoop them up with one hand, but you’ll get rat feet leaking out of your grip in all directions.
(My internal reference for what a kilogram feels like, in fact, is now “two rats smashed into a Kleenex box”. You can get three of them into the average cereal box, if you don’t care what shape the box is when they’re done.)
They might just about hit 16" long if you include the tail, but I’ve never had one that long plus tail. Are they sure that thing isn’t a well-traveled capybara? Brr.
