Last month Pizza Rat instantly captured New Yorkers’ hearts with his relatable passion for a cheap slice of cheese pizza, and even more relatable decision to give up when he realized the task at hand was kind of hard. Now Connecticut’s Fox 61 brings us Selfie Rat, ostensibly a “rat who thinks he’s people” for a new generation. Don Richards says he and his friend were in the President Street subway station in Crown Heights last week when they spotted a rat on the platform, and started filming it as it settled on a man’s lap. Per Fox 61:
>He didn’t originally know the cause, but the man saw a flash and then realized the rat was on top of him, causing him to jump up. What he realized later after looking at his cell phone was that when the rat crawled onto his lap, where his cell phone was sitting, he decided to take a selfie! The camera’s flash is what woke the man up.
Here’s the photo in question:
It’s a bit hard to believe that the rat just happened to crawl onto the lap of a guy who nodded off while his phone was unlocked, in camera mode, and positioned in such away that an animal could accidentally take a picture — particularly because the flash is not visible in the video. When DNAinfo asked about the origin of the footage, a Fox 61 spokesperson said the sleeping man befriended Richards, though he made no effort to chase the rat off of him, and they “texted the picture and video to each other after the incident.”
Even if Selfie Rat is real, he does not deserve our applause. Taking a photo of yourself and getting famous on the internet is easy; we’ll only be impressed if Selfie Rat finds a way to make everyone in America care about his less-talented family members, too.
