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Social media platforms are currently flooded with a heartwarming video showing a young village girl walking through a lush paddy field. In her arms, she carries a small civet, while a small porcupine eagerly toddles right behind her like a pet.
Many international media outlets, including prominent Indian newspaper The Telegraph and multiple Bangladeshi social media aggregators, shared this clip claiming it portrays a real-life “Disney Princess” from rural Bangladesh.
Social Media Claims:
Several viral posts across Facebook and Instagram carry variations of the following caption:
“A young girl in Bangladesh was seen carrying a civet in her arms and walking a pet porcupine. The rare friendship drew widespread attention on social media.”
An archived version of one such misleading post can be found here.
The video gained viral attention across social media platforms
Fact Check:
What is the truth?
Spoken Language Analysis
Upon analyzing the original audio track of the viral video, the child can be heard glancing back at the person filming and asking a question in Sinhala, which is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka.
She clearly asks:
“Dura wadidha?” (දුර වැඩීද?) — which translates directly to “Is it too far away?”
No Bengali is spoken anywhere in the clip. Furthermore, distinct environmental audio cues in the background match rural Sri Lankan villages rather than the plains of Bangladesh.
2. Digital Footprint and Original Source
Fact Crescendo conducted a reverse image search using keyframes from the video. The investigation successfully traced the earliest digital footprint of the footage:
The Original Uploader: The video was first uploaded on June 11, 2026, by a Sri Lankan Facebook user named Prabath Silva.
The Original Caption: It was written entirely in Sinhala: “අක්කා එක්ක කුබුරු යන ඉත්තෑ මල්ලි” (which means “Little porcupine brother going to the paddy field with his elder sister”).
Geographic Disambiguation: The account profile explicitly states the creator’s location as the Polonnaruwa District, located in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka.
Continuous Timeline: The same Facebook profile features multiple older and newer clips showing the exact same little girl bottle-feeding and playing with the baby porcupine over a prolonged timeline, confirming the child resides there.
Additional clips of the animal can be viewed here and here
3. Cross-Border Verification
To ensure complete accuracy, cross-border evidence was analyzed. Stream, an independent fact-checking organization based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, also ran a comprehensive regional trace. Their investigation definitively concluded that the footage did not originate from any local Bangladeshi village and confirmed its true Sri Lankan origin.
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Conclusion :
The claim that the viral video shows a young girl with her pet porcupine in Bangladesh is FALSE. The video was shot in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. The original footage was uploaded on June 11, 2026, by a Sri Lankan user, and the child in the clip speaks Sinhala.
Title: Is the viral video of a little girl walking with a pet porcupine from Bangladesh? Find out the truth…
Fact Check By: Pavithra Sandamali
Result: False
