Farmer Discovers Rat With Plant Growing Out Of Its Back

A bizarre video has emerged showing a rat living with a sapling soya plant growing out of its back.

Experts were baffled by how the plant came to be in the rat's back, but speculated that a soya bean seed could have landed in an open wood and germinated there.

Farmer Datar Singh, who discovered the unfortunate rat, had planted a soya bean crop on his farm in the Ratlam district of Madhya Pradesh in India earlier this year.

He was inspecting his crop when he found the rat on 7 August.

Neighbours rushed to film the incredible rat, which was said to be in 'immense pain' - as you might expect given it had a sapling growing inside it.

SWNS

Confused voices and the snap of a camera can be heard in the video, as the onlookers try to turn the rat over by its tail to inspect what had happened to it.

In the video, the plant appears to be growing out of a wound coated in matted, black blood.

The rat is in so much pain that it is clearly disorientated, only managing to look around without moving, before eventually collapsing. It is clear it would not have had long to live if it had not been discovered.

Shockingly, the video appears to show that the plant had been growing inside the rat's back long enough for the sapling to grow longer than the rat's body length.

Datar took the rat back to his house and removed the sapling, ruling out the theory that it could have been mischievous teenagers playing a cruel prank.

Professor A. Siddiqui, head of the department of biology at a college in nearby Barnagar, said the rat was extremely lucky not to have died because of its encounter with the plant, let alone avoid damage to its brain.

SWNS

He said: "It's a miracle. Though the plant had grown in the region near the neck, there was no brain damage."

It's actually pretty impressive that the rat managed to survive as long as it did, with the sapling's roots growing inside its body.

Hopefully the rat goes on to live a long and plant-free life from here on in.

Topics: News, Weird, Animals, India

Nathan Standley

Nathan Standley is a freelance journalist and LADBible contributor. He graduated from Durham University with a degree in Anthropology before going on to do a Master’s degree in Journalism at the University of Sheffield. He also writes articles for The Versed and is the Cultural Editor of The Common Sense Network.