Even if you don’t drink soda often, twisting open a sweet 20 ounces bottle of the mass-produced, caramel-colored sugar water of your choice and putting it to your lips can be a refreshingly wonderful thing. The liquid pours into your eager mouth, enveloping your taste buds in overwhelming flavors that only a bubbly pop can deliver. But what if your flow was impeded? You’d probably try again by tilting your head back and putting the butt end of that 20 ounces to the sky. Then you’d feel a thud, and you’d check the bottle. Dead eyes are looking at you on the other side of the plastic. Wet fur, soaked by your once delicious drink.
There’s a dead rodent floating in your Dr. Pepper.
That’s what supposedly happened to a Houston family, who discovered a dead rodent floating in their grandson’s Dr. Pepper. “This morning when they opened it they found something floating in there,” Graves said. “Pretty good size. About 3 inches long with a big tail.” He posted pictures of the nightmare-inducing discovery, and we’re going to post them here. But be warned — this is gross.
The grandfather, John Graves, was concerned with the potential health issues that could come from his 3-year-old grandson drinking rodent. “You think it’s rabies. You think of dirty, filthy rodents. What did he ingest?” he said.
Dr. Pepper-Snapple made a lengthy statement:
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety and well-being of our consumers. We take all consumer complaints very seriously, are very concerned about the call we received today from Mr. Graves and are investigating it as best as we can.
“What we know from our experience is that given the controls and safeguards we have in our production facilities it is virtually impossible for any foreign object to enter any container during the bottling process. All of our containers enter our facility on pallets in our warehouse and remain covered until the moment they are placed on our high-speed filling lines. Once on the filling lines, they are inverted and rinsed out before they are filled and capped.
“We have offered to dispatch a courier to pick up the product to take it out for testing by a third party forensics laboratory, but the consumer has declined this request. This lab would be able to analyze any rodent that got into the product, determine how it entered the container and even inspect the contents of its stomach. This process can take six to eight weeks to yield conclusive findings. Until we have the opportunity to review the contents, we don’t have a way to do a full investigation.”
It is currently unknown if the boy has developed any superhero rodent powers.
(Via Click2Houston)