Carolina the African giant pouched rat has retired after a productive seven-year career, and we’re all right proud of her.

We know what you’re asking. How do you celebrate an African giant pouched rat’s retirement? A gold watch is not going to cut it with a modern pouched rat even if the wristband is adjusted. These days they’re not going to settle for anything without on-device Siri and a fitness tracker. So: it’s the usual party. There’s the obligatory sheet cake, the speeches, and there’s that one rat who gets up, swaying, and talks about the time him and Carolina and the rest of the gang went to Reno and ol’ Bubba Rat followed a shapely hamster home and woke up the next day without his pants-fur or his wallet.

Elon Musk has no idea what Carolina the African giant pouched rat did for a living, so she could have been on the random chopping block, had she not retired on her own terms first. Carolina is one of the forty famous HeroRATs trained in Tanzania to detect either tuberculosis or landmines, depending. The rodents’ sense of smell is so acute that they can alert to a mastodon fart molecule preserved in permafrost.

Carolina was a tuberculosis specialist. She’s like one of those cancer-sniffing dogs. Nobody really wants a cancer-sniffing dog shnuffling around on their body. Everyone tenses up. A small percentage of patients die of heart attacks when the dog’s ears prick up. Carolina, though, did all her detection off-site. She was an ace phlegm sniffer, thank you, Mr. Musk. And is said to have detected over 3,000 cases of TB, probably preventing another 30,000 people from infection.

Staff fondly recall the time she alerted to a patient’s phlegm sample even though routine microscope testing failed to find TB; instead he was discovered to have harbored a land mine in his peritoneum, and thus many, many lives were saved. Not his, of course, he had to be detonated, but they took him far away from the population first.

The African giant pouched rat (genus Cricetomys) is not actually a true rat. The true rat is genus Rattus, so named because nobody could come up with a worse name than Rattus. And like the true rat, the pouched rat features that repellent tail nudity. In spite of this they are said to be fine and loyal pets. A breeder in Florida let some of his pouched rats loose and, of course, they became invasive. Thanks again, Florida man.

Ultimately the rat anchor babies were deemed responsible for an outbreak of monkeypox in 2003, detected by a local team of supershrews raised by a 12-year-old Wisconsin boy who had failed to get them to detect girl cooties.

At any rate, this all led to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control banning the importation of African giant pouched rats, closing that barn door a little late. But now that the FDA and CDC have been replaced by the new Department of Contagion and Billionaire Tax Eradication, it looks like our friends the big rats can enjoy freedom in the Land of Liberty once again.

h/t Vicki Luker Bennett!