A bizarre video has emerged of a Chinese man walking with two rats on a street as though they were his pets. The footage shows him walking the rodents with long strings attached to their mouths as leashes at a market in south China’s Guangdong province.
According to a DailyMail report, the man is believed to be a vendor who was using the rodents to promote his rat traps. This is not the first instance of such bizarre marketing as similar scenes have occurred in China before.
This bizarre incident was captured and shared online by a local resident on December 13, at the Shaxi Central Market in the city of Zhongshan. The video footage shows the man walking through the busy marketplace while walking with the two rodents. It appears that the man had placed a wire through the rat’s mouth like a leash. He appeared to have their mouths tied to by a small metal hooks which were then linked to the strings.
The video footage also shows one of the rats sniffing around curiously, while the second one seemed lifeless as it was being dragged on the floor of the road without any movement.
Several onlookers in the market appeared to be unfazed by the act, however, some of them were surprised by the odd scene. The video clip shared by a local onlooker on the Chinese Tik Tok like app Douyin didn’t have any explanation about what the rat trap seller was doing. However, it is believed that the leash/string was a type of rat trap and the man in the video was selling it using the rodents to promote his wares.
As mentioned earlier, similar strange scenes were spotted earlier in various other parts of China. One blogger captured a man walking two rats on the streets of Wuzhou, southern China in September earlier. The trader too had a similar rat trap, and he was filmed showing the metal hooks to potential customers while explaining how it works and how it can be used to catch rats.
It is said, when a rat bites the food particle on the hook, the trap would expand and seize its mouth. Several users were amused by the video footage and it garnered few interesting comments as well.
One user wrote, “I've seen people walking dogs and cats, not rats!” Another user said, “These two are probably the most unlucky rats in history.”
“Walking the mouse on the street, what is going on?” wrote another.