The most disgusting thing in New York

You will need to sit down.

I was waiting for the subway, and I notice some movement on the tracks. It's a rat (bing: that's grossness level 1), and it's dragging something, struggling to hoist it over the next tie, onto the rail; the haul periodically falls back into the gutter, the rat pauses, stuggles and drags it up again (2). The haul, as it turns out, is another rat (3). A dead rat (4), flopping lifelessly up and over and down the obstacles as the live rat drags it along. In fact, the dead rat itself looks oddly like two dead rats intertwined at the tail or at the rump - but that, it turns out, is because it is really a single rat that has at some point been split by a passing subway wheel, its two halves attached now only by a few bits of flesh, like some open-faced rat sandwich, like a butterflied rat, flopping open and closed and open and closed as his friend drags him along the rails (um, 5?). By now of course I am absolutely horrified, and also mesmerized, and horrified, and mesmerized, and also wondering why the live rat is doing this - is this some kind of comrade in arms thing? Soldier down, have to drag him back to the rat's nest and give him a proper burial? What is the evolutionary adaptiveness of that, exactly? This rat risking his life on the same rails that felled his brother? I soon get an answer, though: the reason live rat is pausing periodically is not just to gather his strength, but to lean down and nibble on the splayed entrails of dead rat, nom nom nom, drag a bit further, pause and eat, repeat.

And (6).