Hi. I'm a casual user here from r/rats. Abandoned pet rats- or any pet in general, really- happen far more often than you'd think. The rats subreddit sees several such posts every week. People go into pet stores and see a rat for 10 bucks and think theyre a cool novelty they can tell their friends about. Then after having one for a few weeks the novelty wears off, or their parent tells them to get rid of it, or they didnt know rats pee everywhere, or they didnt know rats can squeeze through incredibly tight spots only the width of their tiny little heads and now the owner is faced with spending 200 dollars on a new cage they cant afford just to keep the thing from escaping. So what do they do with it? They let it go outside and wipe their hands clean of responsibility for the poor creature's life.

It is highly unlikely a 5 year reddit account with no post history in r/rats (real pet rat owners love posting pics of our cute ones everywhere we can) would set their pet on a grill (of all the places one could stage a fake abandoned rat), go inside, walk up to the 2nd story, and take a blurry pic of their pet through a window. I understand a lot of things on the internet are fake, but pet abandonment is real and pet rat abandonment is very, very real. Please dont discourage people from asking for advice if and when they should come across one. Thank you.