4 foot Hackney rat is just forced perspective.

Photo apparently showing a giant “mutant” rat found in Hackney in London is spreading online.

In the photo, a man holding what appears to be a very large rat with a pair of litter picker tongs. The rat appears to be the size of a small child.

However after closer examination, it is clear that the photo (below) is a classic example of forced perspective, a trick popular with fisherman photos. In the photo the rat is being held much closer to the camera lens than the man.

Given that we use both our eyes to evaluate depth, with a single camera lens this can be much more difficult, and under the right circumstances our brains can be tricked into assuming an object is much larger than it is instead of just being significantly closer to the camera when the photo was taken.

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However once you take a close look at a photo, there are giveaways. For one, you can see the business end of the litter picker appears around 3 or 4 times larger than the handle when in reality they are around the same size (we found a similar – if not same – set of litter picker tongs on the Internet, below.)

While rats in the UK can grow to be uncomfortably large (for many) experts have generally agreed that rats the size of small children or weighing what many claim this rat weighed are not likely to be real.