{"id":204773,"date":"2025-12-22T08:03:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T08:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/204773\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T08:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T08:03:07","slug":"viral-video-australian-woman-spots-mysterious-wild-animal-in-dubai-asks-what-the-hell-is-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/204773\/","title":{"rendered":"Viral video: Australian woman spots mysterious wild animal in Dubai, asks \u2018What the hell is that?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An Australian woman was left surprised after spotting a mysterious animal in Dubai \u2013 describing it as something resembling a cross between a bunny, a deer and a dog. Louise Starkey captured a video of a pack of the large animals roaming wild in Dubai and shared it on Instagram, where it has gone viral with 1.3 million views in one day.<\/p>\n

\"Louise Louise Strakey spotted a strange animal in Dubai and shared a video online. (Instagram\/@ellestarkos) Mystery animal in Dubai<\/p>\n

The video, which appears to have been filmed from a moving car, shows three animals that look like oversized rabbits sitting on a patch of grass.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell is that? God, is that a bunny?\u201d a voice off-camera was heard asking.<\/p>\n

Starkey told HT.com that the video was filmed near Crescent Moon Lake in Dubai. \u201cI spotted them just outside of Crescent Moon Lake when I was on my way to a barbecue there. It\u2019s a popular desert location where a lot of people go ,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat in the Harry Potter concoction is this? Is this a bunny deer dog?\u201d she captioned her Instagram video. Starkey, originally from Sydney, Australia, has been living in Dubai <\/a>for the last two years.<\/p>\n

Instagram solves mystery<\/p>\n

After the video was posted online, several Instagram users identified the mystery animal as the Patagonian Mara.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a Mara. The Al Marmoom Desert Conservation Reserve is home to approximately 200 maras, believed to have originated from abandoned pets,\u201d one user commented.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are called a Patagonian mara- and I legit had the exact same reaction when I saw these little bundles of wizardry cuteness sitting in the middle of the roundabout out near Al Qudra,\u201d another said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a bunny. This is a Patagonian mara \u2014 a large wild rodent originally from Argentina,\u201d one commenter explained. \u201cThey look like a mix between a rabbit and a small deer. They\u2019re harmless herbivores and people started seeing them near Al Qudra lakes since 2020 , but they\u2019re wild, so best admired from a distance.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to a 2024 report<\/a> in The Independent, a number of maras can be spotted on the grounds of Al Qudra Lakes. It is not clear how the animals, native to Argentina, ended up in Dubai \u2014 but the widely-accepted theory is that their population grew from abandoned pets.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis large rodent is a common species in zoological collections and undoubtedly found its way out from captivity,” wrote Jacky Judas in his book \u2018A Natural History of the Emirates\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Australian woman was left surprised after spotting a mysterious animal in Dubai \u2013 describing it as something…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[107731,107732,107730,107728,200,61,60,107729,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-204773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-abandoned-pets","9":"tag-al-marmoom-desert-conservation-reserve","10":"tag-al-qudra-lakes","11":"tag-crescent-moon-lake","12":"tag-dubai","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-patagonia-mara","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}