Last week after a KFC customer posted photos and video of what he claimed was a fried rat he’d received with his order of chicken, the company said it believed the whole thing was a hoax, and asked the man to turn over the food in question for independent testing. Lab results are in… and the word is, it’s a bird. Chicken, to be exact.

The man retained an attorney after KFC said it had trouble getting in touch with him to confirm the animal source of the fried food, reports the Los Angeles Times. Though KFC says he refused to communicate directly with them, the company was able to get its hands on the food for testing through his attorney.

The company now says a third-party independent lab has confirmed it was a piece of hand-breaded chicken, as KFC had maintained. And as such, KFC would really like it if the customer would admit he was wrong.

“The right thing for this customer to do is to apologize and cease making false claims about the KFC brand,” KFC said.

Whether or not he’ll do that is uncertain. Last week he remained firm in his stance that he had bitten into a chewy piece of deep-fried rodent.

“Honestly, it doesn’t matter what others think I know what I bit into and what it looks like never in life have [I]… seen a chicken strip with a long tail,” he wrote.

Mystery of the rat-shaped KFC chicken is solved: It’s a bird [Los Angeles Times]

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