Shower Rat

Submission 32,357

About

Shower Rat refers to a viral video in which a common rat appears to be taking a shower in the manner of a human being, standing upright and rubbing it's body in a way that resembles the lathering process. While many online found the video cute and funny, others pointed out that it is possible the rat might have had an irritant on its body, which is why it was acting that way.

Origin

The video of the rat was shot by Jose Correa, who first uploaded the video to Facebook ^[1] on January 27th, 2018 on the account akasoteexcito. In the video, a common street rat appears to be standing upright and rubbing itself in a way that resembles the human showering process. The post (shown below) received more than 44 million views, one million shares, 200,000 reactions and 175,000 comments in 48 hours.

Spread

That day, Twitter ^[2] user offorasteiro tweeted the video with the caption, "eu to sóbrio de mais pra ta vendo um rato tomando banho." The post received more than 1.78 million views, 41,000 retweets and 61,000 likes in 48 hours.

Following this post, people began sharing the video and adding comments about how much they enjoyed it and were surprised by it (shown below, left and center). Pixelated Boat tweeted about how this video might be too good to be true, tweeting "Everyone: SHOWER RAT!!! 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍 / Some asshole rat scientist: It’s doing that because it’s dying." The tweet (shown below, right) received more than 345 retweets and 3,500 likes in 24 hours.

That day, Twitter^[8] published a Moments page on the reaction to the video.

The following day, Redditor ^[3] MichaelRahmani posted the video in the subreddit /r/NatureIsFuckingLit. Within 24 hours, the post received more than 1,500 points (96% upvoted) and 70 comments. Additionally, Redditor^[6] melacolia90 published the video in the /r/likeus subreddit. The post received more tahn 20,700 points (91% upvoted) and 470 comments in 24 hours.

On January 29th, 2018, Metro News^[4] interviewed the video's author Electronic DJ Jose Correa. In the interview, Correa confirms that he shot the video in Huaraz City, Peru. He said:

"He was just like a human, I’ve never seen anything like it. It went on for about 30 seconds, and then he ran off. I think he just wanted to give himself a good clean. I care a lot about animals so I wanted to protect his privacy. I would never want to hurt him. So I just filmed him and let him go."

That day, Gizmodo^[5] published a piece that was more skeptical about what the rat was doing in the video. They spoke to Tuomas Aivelo, researcher in Urban Rat biology at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who said, "A rat wouldn’t do that unless there’s something it really wants to get rid of. I think it’s soapy all over. That’s probably a problem for the rat. It just wants to get rid of the soap.”

Several media outlets covered the popularity of the video, including The Daily Mail,^[9] The New York Daily News^[10] and more.