“Mutant rats” are a huge problem in Tehran, but don’t you worry. Iran snipers have been deployed to deal with the problem in what appears to be one of the finest examples of complete overkill I’ve ever seen.
Then again, these could be R.O.U.S.’s Tehran is dealing with.
MSN reports that 10 teams of Iran snipers, equipped with infrared sights, have been deployed in Tehran to deal with a new wave of “mutant” rats that are plaguing the city. “It’s become a 24/7 war,” said the head of Tehran’s environmental agency. “We use chemical poisons to kill the rats during the day and the snipers at night.” No, we promise this isn’t an Onion story.
What’s worse, the “mutant” rats seem to be winning.
“They seem to have had a genetic mutation,” said an environmental adviser. “They are bigger now and look different. These are changes that normally take millions of years of evolution,”he said.
Seems dramatic, no? Actually, they report that rats weighing in at up to 10 pounds have been killed in Tehran. The National reports that even cats are scared of the “mutant” rats.
So far, the Iran snipers have reportedly bagged more than 2,000 of these monstrous rodents in recent weeks. Sounds like a lot, but Iran’s rat population outnumbers the capital’s 12 million inhabitants, so those sniper teams have a long way to go. The city council is even boosting the number of sniper squads to 40, according to officials.
The massive influx of “mutant” rats has to do with the onset of warm weather, which melts the snows of the nearby Alborz mountains, raising water levels, and flushing rats out of their underground lairs.
The poisons normally used to combat the rat population make rats thirsty so that they retreat back underground looking for moisture.
But the “mutant” rats taken out by Iran sniper squads face a much more grisly fate: They are incinerated or taken to the Kahrizak district in southern Tehran where they are covered in lime and buried.
The only folks in Tehran with any sense of humor on the matter seem to be in the media. A newspaper once ran a cartoon in which a rat says “Our numbers are more than yours, so you leave Tehran” to a bewildered Iranian.
What do you think? Is dispatching Iran snipers to kill “mutant” rats a bit overkill?
