A Chinese woman recently made international headlines after discovering that the white ball of fur she bought a year ago wasn’t really a puppy, but a white fox cub.

Last year, the woman, surnamed Wang, bought what she thought was a Japanese Spitz puppy from a pet shop in Jinzhong, China’s Shanxi province. She started realizing that something wasn’t quite right about her cute pet after about three months, when it stopped eating dog food and started to grow an unusually long, fluffy tail. She didn’t pay too much attention to these details, and just continued feeding it chicken and fruit, which it seemed to like. But then things started getting weirder.

“The fur got thicker when it reached three months old. Its face became pointy and its tail grew longer than that of a normal dog,” Ms. Wang recently told Chinese media. “Also, other pet dogs seemed to be scared by my pet so I started walking it with a leash.”

At one point, the woman realized that her pet Spitz had never barked, which she thought was weird, and when other park-goers started telling her that her dog looked more like a fox, she finally decided to ask an expert. She took it to Taiyuan Zoo, where Sun Letian, an expert in animal epidemic prevention, confirmed what people had been telling her for months – her Japanese Spitz was actually a domesticated white fox.

“Based on the size, it is a domesticated fox. It carries a smell in their body and the smell can get stronger as it grows older,” the animal expert told Wang, adding that it will grow larger than its current 12 inches.

The stunned woman decided to leave her pet in the care of experts at Taiyuan Zoo, where it can receive the care a fox deserves. It will be put in a quarantine zone for a month, while staff there perform the necessary health checks.

 

Ms. Wang was invited to come see her former pet whenever she wants, if she misses it.

It seems there’s something really fishy going on in China right now. Just two days ago we wrote about another family who discovered that their Tibetan Mastiff puppy had grown into a black bear, and now this. Someone should really start a species identification business.