Dozens of rats were caught on camera fleeing a building after workmen discovered them underneath the concrete floors.
In the video, which shouldn’t necessarily be so weird but inexplicably is, the rats can be seen emerging from their underground home as the the workmen break up the concrete.
The footage was captured in Jiangxi, China, where the rats were found in an old building when the owner started new repair work.
Check it out here, if you’re so inclined:
As the video shows, rats come is all shapes and sizes, and obviously don’t mind living in such cramped conditions. Hell, one could even be an aspiring chef, who knows.
The workers have obviously stumbled across what’s commonly known as a rat’s nest, which they’re fleeing like, well, rats from a sinking ship.
The rats in the video are, it’s safe to assume, brown rats, the most widespread and most abundant species of rat. They have colonised almost every part of the world, and a highly adaptable rodents, as Arkive states.
Their adaptability was proven recently, when a farmer discovered a poor rat somehow living with a soya bean sapling growing right out of its body.
Datar Singh, a farmer from the Ratlam district of Madhya Pradesh, India, planted his soya bean crop earlier this year. But was not expecting this when he did.
Check it out:
Datar’s neighbours filmed the rodent, which was said to be in ‘immense pain’. The creature seemed to struggle to move with the growth, and it appeared to not even try to escape when the people on the scene inspected it.
Those in the video can be heard talking, probably expressing their shock and confusion at what they were seeing.
The people tried to turn the rat over by its tail to get a good look, but there was no obvious explanation for the plant which had taken hold.
Datar considered that the rodent might somehow be the victim of a cruel prank.
However, the farmer ruled out the possibility of practical jokes, and it has been suggested that a soya bean seed must have fallen into an open wound on the rat’s back.
Presumably, the plant must then have germinated and begun to grow.
Professor A Siddiqui, head of the department of biology at a college in nearby Barnagar, spoke about the disturbing incident, revealing that the plant could have caused the little rat to suffer much worse consequences.
He said:
It’s a miracle.
Though the plant had grown in the region near the neck, there was no brain damage.
After the video was taken, the farmer took the rat to his home and managed to remove the plant from its back. Hopefully the poor creature will heal soon, and I’m sure it will be keeping far away from any seeds in the future.
If not, perhaps he can turn his flouriishing soya-bean-back into a lucrative business. Strangers things have happened…
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.