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Cannibal Rat? Welcome 2016 With This Rodent Savagery Video
By
Nathan Tempey
Published Jan 3, 2016
Modified Apr 5, 2018
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By
Nathan Tempey
Published Jan 3, 2016
Modified Apr 5, 2018
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Measured in terms of videos on the internet, 2015 was the year of Pizza Rat. For a brief moment there, all of us internet denizens felt like sagely and hilarious-at-cocktail-parties philosophers for concluding that Pizza Rat's struggle to pull a slice down the subway steps was a wee embodiment of the Sisyphean battle all New Yorkers face just to get where we're going and stay fed. Then came all the knockoff videos and product lines and everybody was sick of it long before the crass commercialism subsided.
But people clearly learned something from the whole experience, namely: if you see a rodent struggling to drag something somewhere, pull out your phone, shoot a video of it, and send it to Gothamist. And so it was when, according to YouTube user JB José:
A little before midnight on Jan 2, 2016 at Jay St-Metrotech, Pizza Rat emerges from the darkness to retrieve his fallen comrade. Was it trying to the "wake up" the other? Was it taking it away to eat? Will we ever know?
The audio is a bit muddled, but we can make out one woman asking, "Is that a rat?" On the far end of the subway stairs someone with long hair fiddles with a phone, trying to line up the perfect shot.
Reached by email, José wrote:
We were on the Manhattan bound F platform. It must have been about 11:45pm.
We didn't really notice the dead rat on the steps till the other one appeared on the platform. I started filming cause my gf was deathly frightened (and it seems like the logical thing to do at the time). Everyone was surprised by that rat till we realized it was actually headed to the other one. At this point, other people were saying "gross" or "how sweet" and started filming. I stopped filming after it disappeared into the darkness.
So what do you see when you watch this video? A brutal prelude to cannibalism? Or a desperate attempt to "wake up" the other?
Tagged
animal videos
cannibal rat
pizza rat
savior rat
Nathan Tempey
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