Look-Alike Animals comparison

Rat vs Springhare: Key Differences Explained

The short answer

A springhare is neither a hare nor a small kangaroo: it is an African rodent in the family Pedetidae that travels by bounding on greatly enlarged hind legs, balancing with a long bushy tail tipped in black. A rat runs on all fours, keeps its limbs roughly in proportion, and carries a long scaly tail that is only sparsely haired. Both are rodents, but the springhare has rebuilt its hindquarters for hopping in a way no rat approaches.

The main difference

A springhare is a bipedal hopping rodent with enormous hind legs and a long bushy tail; a rat is a quadrupedal runner with proportionate limbs and a sparsely haired scaly tail.

Spotlit at night in southern Africa, a springhare reads as a rodent that has been assembled wrongly — kangaroo hindquarters, a squirrel's tail, a rat's face. Setting it beside the standard four-footed rodent shows exactly which parts have been rebuilt and which have not.

At a glance

Comparison of Rat and Springhare across 7 dimensions, with an interpretation of each difference.
What differs	Rat	Springhare	What it means
How each moves	Quadrupedal, running and scrambling with all four feet in contact and a scurrying gait through cover	Bipedal bounding on the hind feet, covering long distances in a series of hops with the forelimbs held clear	Gait is visible from a distance in poor light and is the fastest way to separate the two in the field.
Hind limb proportions	Hind legs modestly longer than the forelegs, suited to running, climbing and swimming	Hind legs vastly enlarged with elongated feet, while the forelimbs are short and used mainly for digging and handling food	The limb ratio is the structural cause of everything else about how a springhare gets around.
Tail	Long and rope-like with visible scale rings and thin hair, used for balance and shedding heat	Long, thickly furred and bushy, usually with a dark tip, held out as a counterweight in mid-bound	A bushy dark-tipped tail rules out a rat immediately, whatever the head shape suggests.
Body mass	Brown rats usually weigh in the low hundreds of grams, with larger individuals reported in some populations	Typically a few kilograms, an order of magnitude heavier than a rat	Weight difference means the two occupy quite different positions in the food web despite both being rodents.Published masses vary with species, sex, season and region, and figures for springhares differ between southern and eastern populations.
Use of burrows	Colonial burrow systems with multiple entrances and worn surface runways, often shared and extended over generations	Individual or small-group burrows in sandy ground, entered head first at speed and often blocked behind the animal	Burrow structure reflects sociality: rat systems are communal thoroughfares while springhare burrows serve far fewer animals.
Range	Asian in origin and now established across nearly every inhabited landmass through human transport	Restricted to southern and eastern Africa, in sandy soils with short grazed grassland	Geography closes the question outright, since no springhare occurs naturally outside a fairly narrow African range.
Eyes at night	Moderate eyes with limited night reflection, leaning on whiskers and scent to move in darkness	Large forward-set eyes with strong eyeshine that makes them conspicuous when spotlit	Bright eyeshine over open grassland at night is a springhare signature and is not how a rat appears in the same beam.

How each moves: RatQuadrupedal, running and scrambling with all four feet in contact and a scurrying gait through cover
SpringhareBipedal bounding on the hind feet, covering long distances in a series of hops with the forelimbs held clear
Gait is visible from a distance in poor light and is the fastest way to separate the two in the field.
Hind limb proportions: RatHind legs modestly longer than the forelegs, suited to running, climbing and swimming
SpringhareHind legs vastly enlarged with elongated feet, while the forelimbs are short and used mainly for digging and handling food
The limb ratio is the structural cause of everything else about how a springhare gets around.
Tail: RatLong and rope-like with visible scale rings and thin hair, used for balance and shedding heat
SpringhareLong, thickly furred and bushy, usually with a dark tip, held out as a counterweight in mid-bound
A bushy dark-tipped tail rules out a rat immediately, whatever the head shape suggests.
Body mass: RatBrown rats usually weigh in the low hundreds of grams, with larger individuals reported in some populations
SpringhareTypically a few kilograms, an order of magnitude heavier than a rat
Weight difference means the two occupy quite different positions in the food web despite both being rodents.Published masses vary with species, sex, season and region, and figures for springhares differ between southern and eastern populations.
Use of burrows: RatColonial burrow systems with multiple entrances and worn surface runways, often shared and extended over generations
SpringhareIndividual or small-group burrows in sandy ground, entered head first at speed and often blocked behind the animal
Burrow structure reflects sociality: rat systems are communal thoroughfares while springhare burrows serve far fewer animals.
Range: RatAsian in origin and now established across nearly every inhabited landmass through human transport
SpringhareRestricted to southern and eastern Africa, in sandy soils with short grazed grassland
Geography closes the question outright, since no springhare occurs naturally outside a fairly narrow African range.
Eyes at night: RatModerate eyes with limited night reflection, leaning on whiskers and scent to move in darkness
SpringhareLarge forward-set eyes with strong eyeshine that makes them conspicuous when spotlit
Bright eyeshine over open grassland at night is a springhare signature and is not how a rat appears in the same beam.

How they are related

Both are rodents, but the springhare's placement has been argued over for decades. It sits alone in the family Pedetidae, genus Pedetes, with usually one or two species recognised across southern and eastern Africa, and it has no close living relatives. Rats are murids in the genus Rattus, part of the largest mammal family. The name springhare is doubly misleading: the animal is not a hare, and it is not related to kangaroos either, despite the borrowed body plan.

A note on naming: Springhare covers the genus Pedetes, usually treated as one or two species across southern and eastern Africa, and its position within Rodentia has been revised repeatedly. Rat here means the genus Rattus with the brown rat as reference.

Telling them apart

Watch the movement first. A springhare bounds on its hind feet in long hops, tail streaming behind with a dark tip, then sits upright on its haunches. A rat scurries on four feet, body low, tail dragging. Close up, the springhare's ears are long and narrow, the eyes are large and reflective, and the forefeet carry long digging claws. A rat's ears are rounded, the eyes smaller, and the forefeet unspecialised by comparison.

Bounding on two legs over open grass with a bushy dark-tipped tail and bright eyeshine, somewhere in southern or eastern Africa: springhare. Scurrying on four legs with a long bare scaly tail, near water, buildings or farmland, almost anywhere on Earth: rat. Sitting upright with long digging claws on short forelimbs points to a springhare; a rat sits back to groom but never has that limb proportion.

Habitat and distribution

Springhares need diggable ground: sandy or lightly compacted soils with short grass, often on overgrazed pasture, floodplain margins and dry grassland in southern and eastern Africa. They emerge after dark and feed within a few hundred metres of their burrows. Rats occupy an enormously broader spectrum — river banks, farmland, coastal scrub, ports, sewers and buildings — across nearly every landmass. In parts of southern Africa the ranges overlap, but the microhabitats barely do.

Diet and ecological role

Springhares graze and dig, taking grass, roots, bulbs, stems and fallen seeds, and their preference for short grass means they often concentrate where grazing keeps swards low. They handle food sitting upright, using the forefeet. Rats are omnivores that switch between grain, fruit, seeds, invertebrates, carrion and human food waste depending on supply. One diet is narrow and plant-based, the other is deliberately broad, and that difference maps directly onto how widely each has spread.

Behaviour

Springhares are nocturnal, emerging after dusk and returning before first light, and are usually seen alone or in loose scatterings across a feeding area rather than in structured groups. Alarmed animals bolt in long erratic bounds toward a burrow entrance. Rats are colonial and highly social, with dominance relationships, shared runways and marked hesitation toward anything unfamiliar introduced into an established route. The springhare's social life is far simpler and centred on the burrow rather than the group.

Senses and adaptations

The springhare's adaptations cluster around night, open ground and sand: large eyes with strong reflective eyeshine, long ears, a tail that acts as a counterweight in mid-hop, and a valve-like ability to close the ears while digging. Published work has also reported that springhare fur fluoresces under ultraviolet light, a phenomenon documented in several mammals whose function remains unresolved. Rats instead lead with olfaction, whisker touch and hearing that extends into ultrasound.

More on this topic: Animal senses and adaptations.

Lifespan and life stages

Springhares are longer-lived than a rat's fast schedule allows, with records under managed conditions extending well beyond a decade and wild averages substantially shorter under predation. They also breed slowly for a rodent, typically producing a single well-developed young at a time. Wild rats commonly survive under a year and produce large litters repeatedly, while rats under care usually reach two to three years. Both sets of figures are ranges from limited records.

People and these animals

Rats have followed human settlement for thousands of years, feature heavily in language and folklore, and exist in a domesticated form kept as pets. Springhares are hunted for meat across much of their range and are sometimes regarded as a nuisance where they dig in cultivated ground, but they are also a familiar and even celebrated part of night-time wildlife viewing in southern Africa. Neither relationship is uniform across countries or communities.

Keeping them: what to understand first

The springhare's appeal and its unsuitability are the same trait. An animal built to cross open ground in long bounds needs run distance, not floor area, and it digs extensively on top of that — requirements an enclosure scaled to a rat cannot begin to meet. It is a wild African species with no domestic form, and keeping it is restricted or prohibited in most jurisdictions. The rat, by contrast, exists in a genuinely domesticated form. Welfare and housing questions for any animal belong with a qualified veterinarian, and nothing here recommends acquiring one.

What they have in common

Both are rodents with a single pair of ever-growing incisors that wear down through use.
Both dig and occupy burrows, using them as refuges from predators and daytime heat or cold.
Both are chiefly nocturnal, doing most of their feeding and moving after dark.
Both are important prey for owls, small carnivores and snakes across their respective ranges.

Key differences

The springhare bounds on two greatly enlarged hind legs, while the rat runs on all four feet.
A springhare's tail is thickly furred and dark-tipped; a rat's is scaly and thinly haired.
Springhares weigh a few kilograms, roughly an order of magnitude more than a typical brown rat.
Springhares occur only in southern and eastern Africa, whereas rats have reached nearly every landmass.
A springhare usually raises one well-developed young at a time, while rats produce large litters repeatedly.
The springhare grazes short grass and digs for roots and bulbs, while the rat eats almost anything available.

Where people go wrong

Taking the name springhare at face value and filing the animal with hares and rabbits rather than with rodents.
Assuming a hopping build implies kangaroo ancestry, when it is a convergent solution to open arid ground.
Reading a large bushy tail on a night-time rodent as squirrel-like, when the hind limb proportions say springhare.

Frequently asked questions

Is a springhare a kind of hare?

No. Hares are lagomorphs, a separate order with a distinctive second pair of small upper incisors sitting behind the front pair. The springhare is a rodent with the standard single pair, placed alone in the family Pedetidae. The name records an old impression of a long-legged hopping animal in African grassland rather than any relationship, and the same misleading pattern appears in several other common names.

Is the springhare related to kangaroos?

Not at all — kangaroos are marsupials and the springhare is a placental rodent. The shared hopping build is convergence: several unrelated lineages in open arid country have arrived at long hind limbs, short forelimbs and a counterbalancing tail because that arrangement suits fast travel over sparse ground. Jerboas and kangaroo rats show the same solution in other deserts, again with no close relationship between them.

Why does a springhare hop when other rodents run?

Bounding suits long moves across exposed, sparsely vegetated ground where cover is too far apart to scurry between. It allows sudden direction changes at speed and gets the animal back to a burrow entrance quickly. A rat lives in structurally complex habitat — banks, walls, vegetation, buildings — where a four-footed gait, climbing ability and squeezing through gaps are worth far more than bounding.

How do their tails differ, and why does it matter?

A springhare's tail is long, densely furred and bushy with a dark tip, and it functions as a counterweight that stabilises the body during hops. A rat's tail is long but sparsely haired with visible scale rings, and it serves balance during climbing and running as well as shedding heat. Because the two look nothing alike even in silhouette, the tail is the most reliable single check.

Do springhares and rats live in the same places?

Their ranges overlap in southern and eastern Africa, since rats have been carried nearly everywhere people have settled, but the habitats barely do. Springhares need diggable sandy soil under short grass and forage in the open at night. Rats concentrate around water margins, cultivation, ports and buildings. Being present in the same district is common; sharing the same patch of ground is not typical of either animal.

Read the full profiles

Sources and methodology

How this comparison is built: FaunaHub comparisons are assembled from the sourced animal profiles behind them rather than written as standalone claims. Figures such as size, mass, and lifespan are typical ranges that vary by subspecies, population, region, sex, age, and — where relevant — whether an animal lives in the wild or under human care, so they are presented as ranges rather than fixed values. Where a common name covers a group rather than a single species, the page says so instead of implying a species-to-species match. Conservation status changes over time and should be confirmed against the current IUCN Red List. Dimensions that could not be supported from the underlying profiles are omitted rather than filled in.

What this page does not do: it does not rank the two animals, predict the outcome of a confrontation, or present either one as stronger, smarter, or better. It is not veterinary, medical, first-aid, handling, capture, hunting, or pest-control guidance. For an animal in your care, or any situation involving injury, contact a qualified veterinarian, your local wildlife authority, or emergency services.

Sources and further reading

Authoritative references used for general educational context. External links open in a new tab. These sources do not endorse FaunaHub.

UniversityAnimal Diversity Web — Rattus norvegicus (brown rat) — University of Michigan species account
UniversityAnimal Diversity Web — Rattus rattus (black rat) — University of Michigan species account
ReferenceEncyclopaedia Britannica — Animals reference — Editor-reviewed encyclopedia overview entries
Wildlife referenceIUCN Red List of Threatened Species — Authoritative source for current conservation status
UniversityAnimal Diversity Web — Pedetes capensis (springhare) — University of Michigan species account
ReferenceBritannica — Springhare — Editor-reviewed encyclopedia entry
UniversityAnimal Diversity Web — University of Michigan Museum of Zoology — Peer-edited reference accounts for animal species
Wildlife referenceSmithsonian's National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute — Animals — Educational species pages from the Smithsonian Institution

Last updated: 2026-08-04