Viral Shower Rat Video—Turns Out that the “Rat” Was not Taking Shower at All

Recently a video in which a “rat” was taking shower like humans got an instant hit on the social media and it spread like some storm on the internet. However, it turns out that the rat-like creature of the video is neither a rat nor it was taking shower.

This video was clicked in Peru. As per the video, the rat was shown taking shower standing on its hind legs in a drain, covered in soap from head to toe and scrubbing its body like humans do.

People found the video hilarious, funny and cute and started sharing it, making it viral in just no time at all.

Well, first that creature in the video is not a rat but a rodent and it was not taking shower. The animal is a pacarana—a brown rodent from South America. Tuomas Aivelo—who did his studies on rodents informed that soap is an unnatural thing for the rodents as they have no familiarity with it and rodent would not make such human-like movements unless it really wants to get rid of it.

According to The Independent, rodents require a layer of fur to keep themselves protected from dirt or moisture and this happenstance of dirt keeps the fur clean, thus, covering with soap would make the rodent dirty.

Aivelo explained that the rodent had panicky movements as it was unable to clear itself from soap.

Dallas Krentzel—another researcher who studied rodents’ diversity informed that the animal in the video is much larger than a rat and does not even have a long tail which the rats possess. He indicated that such kind of washing is uncommon for rodents and is pretty unsafe and inhumane.

Another indication that it was not a rat, but a rodent as told by Krentzel while conversing with Newsweek, is that the video was shot in Peru and pacarana are originally from there.

The video was posted on YouTube on Sunday with the caption of “Rat taking a shower”. The video so far has 800,00 views and reposts on social media site—Facebook—which has more than seven million views.

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