New York is getting rid of rats by sterilizing them

We’d like to see less of you.

There may be as many rats as there are people in New York City, and that is a lot of rats. Fortunately the rats in New York, unlike the standard of living, are not any worse than the rats anywhere else. But they still want to get rid of them. And now city officials are prepared to go straight to the source of rats: rat uteruses. They propose to reduce rat populations through mass sterilization.

So how do you make a rat sterile? Well you mix up some stuff — salt, sugar, fat, industrial chemical, and an herb. (Which herb specifically is unclear, maybe because city officials don’t want you copying their secret recipe, maybe because come on we all know this is a recipe for pot brownies.) Then the rats eat and drink the stuff (some of it is liquid, which supposedly rats like because it’s harder to get than say, pizza), and then the chemical basically finds its way into the rat’s system and lo and behold. All of a sudden, the rat is still good at being a rat but sucks at making more rats.

Now, just in case you were worried that female humans sharing the subway platform with their rat sisters were going to get contact sterilized, rest assured that rats metabolize this sterilizing agent fast. Their rat poop comes out fairly benign. So if people are running around on the subway platform stepping in rat poop — and they are! — they don’t have to worry that this stuff might make them unable to give birth to non-rat, human babies. So go ahead. Step in rat poop. (Oh. Right. You already are.) We can get rid of rats and rat poop at the same time.