|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In May 2018, for reasons that remain obscure, an old photograph purportedly showing a twelve-pound rat that was caught in London was reposted to Facebook by a variety of pages: This is a genuine photograph. However, the size of the rat appears exaggerated in both the claim and the image. The large rodent was captured by an electrician in Hackney Downs in March 2016. When the snapshot first appeared, it was accompanied by the claim that the pictured animal was at least four feet (1.21 meters) long and weighed more than 25 pounds (over 11 kilograms). Neither of these dimensions came from a tape measure or scale, however; the estimates were given by the man who took the photograph: It appears that the more modern claim that this rat weighed twelve pounds comes from a conversion error. When experts in London weighed in on the size of this rat in 2016 (they mostly said that the claimed size was preposterous), they used kilograms instead of pounds. When this weight (almost 12 kg) was converted back to pounds, the number stayed the same. But even this claim, which is less than half of the original estimate, appears to be widely overblown. The measurements are too big for London rats. The brown rat, which is commonly found in London, only grow to around a foot long: One of the biggest rats in the world — the Gambian pouched rat — can grow up to about three feet long. Other giant rats, such as New Guinea's woolly rats and the Northern Luzon giant cloud rat also get uncomfortably large, but fall well short of the claimed measurements. That the London rat appears unusually monstrous may be a result of forced perspective, which can make an object appear much larger than it actually is since it is closer to the camera lens than the other objects in the image. The Hackney Council posted an example of forced perspective in order to quell fears that the neighborhood was experiencing an infestation of rodents of unusual size:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}