The adventure of a rat, shall lead the way!

As you may already know our group was going to include a character into our environment, so that we had meaning for a camera going round the cave, instead of it randomly moving without any reason. Our character is meant to be of a small rat who is exploring the cave for the first time. We were mainly going to have this in first person with some camera wobbles and sniffing sound effects to give the audience the impression of a rat. We had also decided to have a scene where there would be broken glass on the floor which the rat runs up to and you would be able to see his reflection.
Now, the issue we are having due to such a short amount of time left for this project is actually modeling a rat. Jared said that if we were able to find one online we could use that, but the problem with that is firstly, we would have to pay for it, and secondly it would still need to be rigged. We came up with another idea of green screening a rat, or mouse or even a gerbil as they are all similar. But as i thought more into it the more problems i was finding. Mainly that whenever we would try to green screen it, it probably wouldn't do what we need it to do, or it will just run away and then there would be ciaos.
So, i think our only option left is still do our first person perspective with the wobbling and sniffing but just without the audience being able to see the rat at all. I think this will still be successful as we will have sound effects of a rat dueing the animation and the rat will be looking up at buildings so you will know the character is really small.
Even though this is not really what we wanted, i think this is the next best thing. I think we all got carried away with modeling our environment that we completely forgot about our character until now. And it just shows that trying to get one online is not the way to go!