“Rabbit or Raven” Is The Newest Optical Illusion That Social Media Is Going Crazy Over

By
Stephanie Ortiz
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Well, social media folk, we’ve been here before. Remember back in the good old days, when we hotly debated the color of “the dress” (and for the record, I still say white and gold) Or how about what color that infamous sneaker was: pink & white, or grey & teal?

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Let’s not forget the audio debate that nearly broke the Internet last year, with families being torn apart over whether the clip said, “Yanni” or “Laurel”.

You’d think by now that we would have learned to agree to disagree about such trivial matters, right? We should simply trust our own perception and move along peacefully, letting others trust their own.

But again, this is the INTERNET we’re talking about. And if there’s one thing people of the Internet love to do, it’s to hotly debate silly minutiae.  

The newest perception debate that is creating an uproar on social media is an optical illusion that depicts either a rabbit or a raven, and people are losing their minds over it.

It all started, as these crazy trends do, with a seemingly innocent video clip of an animal being stroked on its… head? Nose? Who knows for sure? The clip was uploaded to twitter by user Dan Quintana on August 18, & it quickly blew up as fellow tweeters became locked in a heated debate: what kind of animal do you see? Is it a raven, or is it a rabbit??

While the truth was later revealed by the poster, let’s first check out how Twitter reacted to this puzzling video. 

In classic Twitter fashion, people were more than happy to share their own thoughts on the debate.

Luke (or NOT Luke, apparently) isn’t feckin around, people. He’s firmly on the “crow” (bird) side of this debate.

I mean, come ON- you can clearly see the animal’s nictati- I mean, it’s nickel-tati- it’s… whatever “nictitating membranes” are, this thing’s got them, so… it’s clearly a CORVID. Obviously.

(Note: Corvid means “a bird of the crow family”. And no, I didn’t know that, either.)

 

Do “birds of a feather” really flock together??  They do if they’re insisting that the “rabbit” people are wrong.

In the grand tradition of epic social media debates, many people also commented to assert that the “bird” people were wrong, especially since Quintana’s comment  before the clip in his tweet made it seem obvious.

Above the video, Quintana wrote:

Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose.

Exactly. Who is confused: Dan Quintana, for claiming it’s a rabbit, or those that think it really IS a rabbit?

Are we being gaslighted here? What the WHAT??

 

Then of course, there are those that just want to provide some comic relief:

 

But the reality is, we need to know. What IS this thing?? 

Same, girl. SAME. And so are countless others, since the tweet clip has over 9.4 MILLION views in less than one week.

After all of the fiery debating, the bottom line was: what the heck IS this thing??

Are you ready for the answer??

It’s a bird, baby!!! 

According to Dan Quintana, the animal in the video clip is indeed a bird, but he deliberately mentioned the word “rabbit” in his post to in order to examine, as he described to The Huffington Post:

How context and attention can influence what we perceive in the world.

Without mentioning rabbits, most people would likely have identified the animal as a bird. But by adding the misleading cue of “rabbit”, it forced some people to examine the video in a different context than they might otherwise have viewed it.

Once Quintana revealed the truth, you’d think that would be enough to quell the debate. But nay, my friends- the battle rages on, because social media sure does love a good optical illusion debate!

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