Bathroom Break of the Day: Here's a Reminder that Rats Can Totally Climb into Your Toilet

Welp, just plan on holding it for the rest of your life.

National Geographic decided to make everyone feel even less safe by writing up a long piece, complete with video, on how exactly rats can scale up your pipes and pop into your toilet. Sadists over there, every one of them.

Rats' superpowers are near-mythical: They can swim for three days. They can fit through holes the size of a quarter. They've even been said to have no solid bones, just cartilage (definitely false, and I can't confirm whether they can collapse their ribcages). I looked to science for the truth. But I was surprised by the dearth of studies on the Norway rat—the common city rat, Rattus norvegicus—in the wild (the wild in this case being any city on Earth). Despite our long human history with lab rats, we know very little about the lives of the rats in our homes.

..."If it doesn't have food and water, it goes into this kind of 'crazy mode,'" ['Rat King' Robert] Corrigan said. Rats have a very low tolerance for hunger—so to get rid of them simply ask where they're getting food and eliminate the source.

Corrigan said... it does make it easier for rats to get into toilets. As if to make the point, the day after we capped our toilet pipe, a rat popped up in my next-door neighbor's toilet.

Plus, toilet drainage turns out to be a boon for sewer rats. "Lots of food gets flushed," Corrigan pointed out.

Yep, you can't think of the toilet as a safe throne. Think of it more of a rat dimensional portal.

They even put together a frighteningly descriptive video on just exactly a rat can make its little way up to the commode and into your nightmares.