In October 2025, a video went viral online in which a cat allegedly put a dead rodent in the mouth of a sleeping person. The recording received millions of views. We have verified the accuracy of this video.
“What caring cats…” - this is how the Telegram channel commented on the viral video “Ax+"(2.3 million views at the time of writing this analysis, taking into account the repost of the channel "Ax Live"). Some other publications document the incident called the cuteness of the day and wondered question: “Well, how can you not adore cats after this?” According to the TGStat service, since October 11, at least 230 similar Russian-language posts have appeared on Telegram, which in total received more than 4.1 million views. Channels such as “Dvach"(291,000 views), "Rhymes and punches"(194,000), "Humorist"(156,000), Vobla (130,000), "Ax news 2.0" (93,000), "Goose Gagarik"(84,000), "Rhymes and news"(79,000), "Salvador to Dali" (51,000), "Woolly pranksters • cats" (43,000), "PE Perm"(38,000), etc. The video also went viral on other platforms. For example, it was posted on VKontakte by a public MDK (171,000 views). In addition, the entry is found on Facebook* (examples here, here And here) and Instagram* (here And here), as well as on YouTube And "Peekaboo"
In the 10-second clip, purportedly from late-night CCTV footage, the cat approaches a man sleeping in bed and places a mouse carcass directly into his open mouth. After this, the man suddenly wakes up, spits out the dead animal and says in English: “Oh, my God!”
In September "Verified" sorted it out A video of a cat throwing a mouse into a pot of soup was proven to be generated by a neural network. In that article we mentioned, that at the end of the summer of 2025, a flash mob was born on TikTok: with the help of neural networks, users created and published numerous videos about how cats bring dead mice and other small animals to their owners’ beds and put them in people’s mouths. Often such records published Until now, they are just imitating night photography, similar to the one shown in the video discussed in this text.
Some users suspected that the post that went viral in October was also created by AI, but the authors of individual posts rejected this assumption. For example, this is what the YouTube channel did Kyivdenni, in which the video received 10,000 views. User "Peekaboo“called on the site moderators to add a tag about neural networks to the post with this entry, but received the following response: “I don’t see any traces of generation in the video. If there is evidence of generation, the tag will be displayed.”
However, one of these traces can be found with the naked eye. "Checked" more than once wrotethat the operation of neural networks is often caused by an error related to the incorrect display of the shooting time counter, which the AI reproduces on the generated recordings from surveillance cameras. That's what happened with this video. At the top of it it is indicated that it was allegedly taken at 02:38, but first the seconds are counted in reverse order: 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, and then random numbers are given: 20, 29, 28 and 27.
The video we are interested in has gone viral in the English-speaking segment of the Internet. For example, in social network X there is only one fast with the caption “Breakfast is served” received more than 5 million views. However, in that tweet there was a note from Community Notes, according to which the video was generated by AI. There they referred to fast fact-checking project Hoax Eye, which has 191,000 subscribers in X. The author of Hoax Eye drew attention to the blurry areas in the video and suggested that there could be a watermark of the neural network used. According to him words, possible original source of the video - publishing AI content Filipino Facebook user Don Bendal, on whose page there is a corresponding entry appeared October 10 at 14:40 Moscow time.
“Checked”, in turn, further studied profile Bendala on TikTok, where also published video of a cat putting a mouse in its owner's mouth. However, there it was essentially copied using the “Duet” function, and the original was posted October 10 at 01:41 on the page @memesvideos330, where it received more than 26 million views. Since October 5, 2025, this user has published several dozen videos created using a neural network. Moreover, initially his videos featured the watermark Sora, a neural network from OpenAI, but a few days later @memesvideos330 began to cover up this emblem.
As already wrote “Checked”, sometimes cats, even well-fed ones, bring home dead mice, birds and other small creatures. According to research, this manifestation of hunting instincts is influenced by several factors, including the nature of the pet, environmental conditions and the owner’s attitude towards the animal. One hypothesis says that by bringing food home, cats exhibit maternal instinct. According to another version, they do this because they feel safe and can safely eat their prey at home.
Thus, the video that went viral on the RuNet, where a cat puts a dead rodent in the mouth of a sleeping man, was generated by a neural network (most likely Sora). This video first appeared on TikTok, where users have been posting similar AI recordings for several weeks.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: @memesvideos330 (TikTok)
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