A grey squirrel in south London picked up a discarded e-cigarette, held it between its paws, and started chewing.
The video hit social media and racked up millions of views overnight – because it looked hilarious.
What it actually showed was something far darker, and the vape industry has been hoping no one puts the pieces together.
Vaping Squirrel Video Exposes What Disposable Vapes Do to Wildlife
Old-fashioned cigarettes sat in gutters for decades without wildlife giving them a second look.
Nobody ever filmed a squirrel clutching a Marlboro.
Craig Shuttleworth, a red squirrel expert at Bangor University, explained why disposable vapes are different: the fruity scent is chemically engineered to smell exactly like food a foraging animal would want to find.
"It would be reasonable to assume that a vape would be more attractive than a normal tobacco product that's not fruity," Shuttleworth told The Telegraph.
The squirrel in Brixton wasn't smoking for fun.
It was being tricked.
And the RSPCA's own scientists confirmed why the trick keeps working long after the human who littered moves on: a dissected vape still smelled powerfully of blueberry more than three months after being discarded and picked up off the ground.
These things don't just attract wildlife once.
The Disposable Vape Ban That Manufacturers Already Gamed
The UK government banned single-use disposable vapes in June 2025, citing the environmental damage from nearly five million devices discarded every week.
That number should have been a scandal the moment it was published.
It wasn't.
Instead, manufacturers responded the way they always respond to inconvenient regulations: they found a loophole.
They redesigned the devices with a USB charging port and a secondary pod, making them technically "rechargeable" and therefore exempt from the ban.
The streets of London still have discarded vapes on them.
The Veterinary Poisons Information Service received 680 calls about vape incidents involving pets since 2017 – 96 percent involving dogs.
A bird in New Zealand died after swallowing one.
A squirrel in Wales was photographed trying to bury one.
The Brixton squirrel is the latest animal on a list nobody in the vape industry wants printed anywhere.
What's Actually Inside Every Discarded Vape on the Sidewalk
The contents are not benign.
Concentrated liquid nicotine, lithium batteries, microplastics, and chemical flavoring compounds sit inside every one of those devices.
Veterinary experts are clear: nicotine poisoning in small animals moves fast – symptoms appear within 15 to 30 minutes of ingestion, and without immediate treatment, the outcome can be fatal.
The squirrel grabbed what smelled like a piece of fruit.
What it actually grabbed was a device containing enough nicotine to kill it, wrapped in plastic it could shred into fragments small enough to swallow.
The vape industry spent years marketing these products in candy colors with names like "Strawberry Ice" and "Mango Tango," flavors engineered to pull in young customers.
It turns out those same flavors work just as well on wildlife.
The company executives who designed them knew exactly what they were doing with teenagers.
They just didn't mention the squirrels.
Sources:
- Paul Bois, "Video: Squirrels 'Vaping' Discarded E-Cigarettes Due to Fruity Aromas," Breitbart, March 25, 2026.
- "Squirrel filmed 'vaping' in London park after 'mistaking fruity smells for food,'" The Telegraph, March 23, 2026.
- "Single-use vapes banned from 1 June 2025," GOV.UK, May 30, 2025.
- Renee Schmid, DVM, "E-cigarettes and Pet Safety," VCA Animal Hospitals.
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