MANHATTAN — A Rodent Of Unusual Size took a ride on the subway this week.
Commuters on the A train in Lower Manhattan cowered, cringed and screamed in fear over a large rat that appeared to have lost its way on Monday, a YouTube video shows.
In a mixture of terror and amusement, the Brooklyn-bound riders in the recording lifted their legs off the ground as the foot-long rodent raced around the car in sheer terror.
The sound of a woman loudly sobbing, plus shrieks and shouts, can be heard at the beginning of the video, shot by Jinais Ponnampadikkal Kader.
The video, first reported by Gothamist, shows a gray-haired man looking around and chuckling and a bearded man in a business suit and a briefcase crouching on his seat, smiling. A man in a Yankees cap whipped out his phone and started to record the scene.
"In their defense, it was an unusually BIG rat. LOL," Kader said on Facebook.
Despite the gross-out factor, most of the riders seemed to be enjoying the spectacle.
So, what's the MTA gonna do?
They're gonna fix that rat, that's what they said they'd do. Literally.
The MTA is hosting a rat sterilization program so that the rodents can't reproduce, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.
The National Institutes of Health has funded the project that has run with "positive, but incomplete results" in three Manhattan stations — Second Ave, 86th Street and Lexington Avenue and Grand Central station, Ortiz said.
Transit officials have also allocated $1.4 million to improve the sealing of garbage rooms throughout the subway system and over half a million dollars to put poison in the underground stations.
