- The fires that have ravaged part of Australia in recent months have made certain animal videos very successful on the web.
- One of them, particularly viral in recent days, claims to show a vixen feeding hungry koalas.
- But the sequence was actually filmed in 2009, in Canada ... and shows cubs.
Over 475,000 views and nearly 14,000 shares. On Facebook, a video allegedly shot during the recent fires that ravaged part of Australia has been a huge success. Not surprisingly, given the scene she claims to show: “A fox feeds baby Koalas in Australia. [...] The babies lost their mothers [in the fires] ".
These thirty-two seconds of video - which have also been widely circulated on English-speaking sites - seem to show a vixen breastfeeding young koalas, visibly hungry. But this legend is misleading since it is actually a video filmed in 2009, in Montreal (Canada) and showing cubs.
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Its author, the Quebec biodiversity photographer Luc Durocher, shared it for the first time on December 26, 2014 on his Facebook account.
Another video shot on the same occasion - more precisely on April 1, 2009 in Jean-Drapeau Park, as he explained to our colleagues at Snopes - but from another angle makes it clear that this is indeed foxes and no koalas.
The photographer's video is not his first diversion out of context: some internet users had already taken it up in 2018, claiming that it showed a vixen feeding little monkeys.
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