China is famous for its ruthless public shaming on burglars, and the latest victim was apparently a rat.
Pictures spotted on Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging platform, showed the rodent being tied up to what seemed to be a trolley.
A piece of paper attached to the animal’s body explained that it had been caught stealing rice at a convenient store.
Two pictures were posted yesterday by a Weibo user with the screen name ‘jiu lian shan she zhang’.
The post said: ‘A friend of mine found a small rat in the warehouse of a convenient store.’
It carried on saying: ‘After [it] was arrested, it was shamed by a poster. Poor rat! How could it spend the Lunar New Year?’
The uploader indicated that the two pictures had been taken at the Lianping County of Heyuan city in southern China’s Guangdong Province.
In the first picture, a post-it note was attached to the rat. The note was written as if the rat had been complaining to the man who had caught it and shamed it.
The note read: ‘Huh, is this the best you could do? Even if you beat me to death, I would not admit that the rice at your home had been stolen by me.’
In the second picture, the rat had a different post-it note attached to its body, which read: ‘I dare not do it again!’
A person can be seen taking a picture of the rat and the note.
The trolley is believed to be transporting boxes of bin liners.
The account holder of ‘jiu lian shan she zhang’ confirmed to MailOnline that the rat had been caught at a shop in Zhuhai city, Guangdong Province, which was owned by his friend. The said that the notes had been written by staff at the store.
The man has not expected the pictures would draw so much attention on social media today.
He explained that many people had left comments under the pictures with different opinions.
He said: ‘Some people pitied the rat, some people hated the rat, and some people found it to be funny.
‘I pity the rat. It’s just a small animal. It would almost certainly die being treated like this.’
The owner of the shop where the rat had been caught confirmed that the rat had been found by his staff.
The man, named Lai Tiancai, said ‘it was just a rat’ and this was a ‘small incident’. The man added that the incident should not matter too much.
The uploader has called for attention from the Shenzhen Traffic Police through his post.
In response to the pictures, the Shenzhen Traffic Police posted three smiling face emojis on its official account on Weibo yesterday.
In January, 2016, a man and woman from China filmed themselves tying up a defenseless mouse and ‘interrogating it’ for allegedly stealing bananas.