Family Claims to Have Found a Baby Mouse in a Bottle of Milk

Inside a Wahaha milk factory in China. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

A family claimed to have found the body of a baby mouse in a bottle of milk that they purchased from a major producer in China, according to Chinese online news outlet Pear Videos.

The object found inside has not been verified at the time of reporting. The product specifically was Wahaha AD Calcium Milk, according to the Aug. 31 report.

The alleged mouse was found in a bottle of milk bought from a supermarket in Dongguan City of China’s southern Guangdong Province on Aug. 26. The bottle of milk came from China’s largest beverage producer, called Hangzhou Wahaha Group.

Of Mice and Milk

The initial post made by the family on social media warned online users about the find. “Men, women, young, and old who love drinking AD Calcium Milk, [we] found an unknown object resembling a baby mouse’s carcass!” written in an initial social media post from a censored author, according to Pear Videos.

“My uncle bought some Wahaha AD Calcium Milk at a supermarket in Dongguan, Guangdong,” the woman who initially exposed the incident online told Pear Videos. “[He] opened it to drink it, but by the third mouthful he couldn’t suck out anymore [from the straw].”

The bottles are often covered with a foil top and a straw is used to pierce a hole into the drink.

“Then [he] discovered this object,” the woman told Pear Videos. “There wasn’t just one, either. When we pulled out the straw, we found there were parts inside.”

“The sales person pulled out the other parts.”

A worker checks milk products at the product line in a factory of Hangzhou Wahaha Group in China. Photo by China Photos/Getty Images

She explained that the milk bottle was taken back to the supermarket, and that the sales person pulled the top open, according to Pear Videos.

“Since we haven’t yet gone through quality inspection, we can’t verify that it’s a baby mouse’s body,” the woman told Pear Videos. “But what we saw at that time was kind of similar.”

The sales person also commented on their situation, presenting some contradictions. “They bought a bag of that stuff from us, and left it in their home for 10 days before drinking it,” the sales person told Pear Videos. “We didn’t open it, when they brought it to us it was already opened.

Compensation Request

“My uncle felt that he should get a physical exam, since he threw up that day,” the woman told Pear Videos. She said her uncle’s stomach was uncomfortable, and that the hospital found he had a stomach flu, according to Pear Videos. She said they spent more than $100 (700 yuan) on the physical exam.

Chinese workers load bottles of Wahaha drinking water onto a truck for shipment. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

From this, they asked Wahaha to compensate them for the medical fees. “They said that the most they could compensate was $140 (1,000 yuan), but we felt that the compensation wasn’t very reasonable,” the woman told Pear Videos.

The family also brought the opened bottle to the Wahaha factory in their area, a Wahaha employee told Pear Videos. The employee said that after leaving the milk product out with an open top for a week, two weeks, or a month would certainly cause it to go bad.

“What he said was a mouse’s skin, he has to have it verified whether it’s a mouse’s skin or whatever it is,” the employee told Pear Videos. “Can [he] just casually say it’s a mouse’s skin?”

Further, the employee said that the family asked for over $1200 (8,800 yuan) in compensation, according to Pear Videos. The employee rhetorically asked if it’s reasonable to ask for that much money on a product that costs so little to buy.

The family and Wahaha are still working to an agreement at the time of reporting.