Huge four-foot-long rat found in London
Engineers were astonished to see a dead “mutant rodent” which was found near a child’s playground while the men were working at a block of flats near Hackney Downs, north London on Thursday.
46-year-old gas engineer Tony Smith saw the rodent in a bush, saying it was the largest rat he had ever seen in his entire life.
“I’ve got a cat and a Jack Russell and it was bigger than both of those.”
The creature was measured at a whopping four feet long.
“We were going to stick it in the bin, but before we did we thought we better take a picture of people won’t believe it’s real,” Smith said.
Smith said that the estate where he was working has an infestation of rats, so poison is left around to catch the creatures.
He said: “The bins get left open nearby so these little fellas have a pretty good diet. They eat fried chicken and rice all the time.”
However specialists have surmised that the rat could be a Gambian pouched rat because of the animal’s very large head.
Gambian pouched rats have extremely sensitive noses and are used in Gambia to sniff out mines and in the UK are used to sniff out tuberculosis.
source: ITV