Giant Rats

WTF!?! Giant rats really do exist? Great, it's my equivalent to uber poisoness snakes. There's an interest, but with complete disgust and a body twitch to hopefully never be in the presence of one without a large and thick glass in-between. When I was younger and used to watch the Princess Bride, I always hated the scene where Wesley and Princess Buttercup were trudging through that quicksand fire pit of a forest and were attacked by yes, GIANT RATS!!! Now, to my horror, they're not just a fable, but reality. Thanks telegraph.co.uk. Just lovely. You've totally made my day.

The article also brings to mind my first 'true' pet that was solely mine - a rat named Violet. I was quite young, somewhere under the age of five and I adored her like no other (yes, I was an eccentric child). The only reason I'm sharing that once in a blue moon I liked rats as pets, is because I remember going to this pet store in a small shopping mall (if you could even call it that) off of 9th Street and across from Bi-Mart in Corvallis. There, in my tiny state, I vividly remember seeing a 'giant rat'. It was stuffed into a normal rat aquarium, alive, with what I assumed to be it's babies crawling all over it. It couldn't move, as there was no room, and was left to just lie there on it's side offering itself to the young ones. Talking about this makes my heart sink a little and question if I actually saw what I remember thinking I saw. How sad a life would that be? Poor mini giant rat. Ew.

Anyways, enjoy the article, cringe a little, and thank god you don't have to run across ones that big in the street.

A giant rat with one-inch-long teeth has been caught in the southern Chinese province of Fujian.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

The rat, which weighed six pounds and had a 12-inch tail, was caught at the weekend in a residential area of Fuzhou, a city of six million people on China's south coast.

The ratcatcher, who was only named as Mr Xian, said he swooped for the rodent after seeing a big crowd of people surrounding it on the street.

He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.

"I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!" he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene.

The local forestry unit in the city identified the nightmarish creature as a bamboo rat from initial photographs, but said that it would need to examine the rat more closely before making a final identification.

Chinese bamboo rats rarely grow beyond ten inches and are found throughout southern China, northern Burma and Vietnam.

However, the Sumatra bamboo rat, usually found in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan and in the Malay Peninsula can grow up to 30 inches long, including tail, and can weigh up to eight pounds.

A "Giant Rat of Sumatra" is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes tale: The Adventure of a Sussex Vampire.

All bamboo rats are slow-moving and usually spend their time in underground burrows, feeding on bamboo. Chinese bamboo rats are often sold for meat in Chinese markets. The largest rats in the world are thought to be African giant pouched rats, which can grow up to 36 inches in length.