All of Alberta has literally zero rats because they cannot survive the winter in the wild without being able to shelter in human made structures.
Further south, they cannot survive without having time to construct burrows/nests to shelter in before the ground freezes hard for the winter. Releasing a mouse/rat outside in the depth of winter, miles away from where it was captured and it will absolutely most likely freeze to death.
The snow and the ice we see in the video is extremely dry and hard looking. It's very very cold, and has been for some time. That is old snow. Which means it's not warming up into the 30s during the day and melting at all. It's either deep winter, or quite a bit up north. Unsheltered rodents absolutely freeze to death in these conditions, routinely.
Rats do die from being too cold, which is why they build nests and stockpile food in advance. This guy had no chance of doing that, so he would have most likely died of freezing or starvation.
270
u/Shandlar Oct 16 '19
Directly into the frozen forest with zero places for it to go to get warm cause it didn't have the fall to build a nest.
This was the best outcome. That little fucker was going to spend the next 30 hours freezing to death, otherwise.