WASHINGTON, DC – They creep through dark alleys, peer behind trash cans and peer inside old takeout containers.
They’re not rats, they’re Rat Rangers.
These rangers work to educate DC residents on ways to prevent rat infestations without using poison. They organized after a 2024 city wildlife study showed that a large number of D.C. wildlife with blood clotting problems tested positive for rodenticides.
On a weekday evening in late September, Rat Ranger leaders Holly Gerberich and Gerard Brown, wearing matching T-shirts with a rat on the front, lead two dozen Washington, D.C. residents down a dimly lit alley. The group is equipped with headlamps, closed shoes and not enough mosquito spray.
Gerberich, an anthropologist, explains to the crowd that a pair of healthy Norway rats living in a city can produce 15,000 offspring in a single year. Despite the use of poison, traps and even contraceptives, the rat numbers in Washington, DC are rising.
A group gathers for a walk in front of Bruce Monroe Elementary School in the Park View neighborhood of Washington, DC.
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But rats aren’t really the problem, she says, humans are.
“The reason they are here is because we provide them with an ideal environment,” Gerberich says. “How can we make our environment less welcoming to rats?”
The answer, she says, is to get humans to understand why they can’t leave their trash and waste for rodents to feast on. And the best way to do that is to show people the problem up close.
Holly Gerberich, an anthropologist and urban rodent expert who leads rat walks with the DC Rat Rangers in Washington, DC.
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The group does not need to look very carefully for signs of the presence of rodents. The alley they ventured into is filled with overflowing trash cans. They stop next to a crushed bag of dog poop, dinner scraps, and the remains of a stick of butter.
“Sanitation is really a way to control rodents,” says Gerberich. “What we find is that individuals play a much larger role than they think in preventing rat populations.”
To emphasize this, two long rat tails protrude from the top of a trash can. Sensing trouble, a plump rodent runs away: it jumps onto a side trash can, then throws itself from can to can, dropping behind a fence and fleeing into the darkness.
Gerard Brown, director of The Rodent Man Consulting, leads a walk in Park View with the Rat Rangers.
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“I like seeing them,” said 13-year-old Auggie Merritt. “I think it’s pretty cool.” In a quick flash, the second rat fled. “Oh, there’s one over there,” Auggie murmurs.
“As long as I’m here, everything’s fine,” Auggie’s father, Dennis Merritt, says, laughing while taking a considerable step back.
The group bombards the Rat Rangers with dozens of questions. What do rodenticides do to rats? What if we added snakes to the environment? Stray cats? What happened to rats during COVID-19?
Many have empathy for rats.
Zac Wood and his partner Lydia Barker came to the walk because they wanted to learn more about alternatives to using pesticides. (Most rodenticides contain anticoagulants, causing painful death to anything that consumes them.)
Rats hang around a group of trash cans, sometimes hidden in a fence, in Washington DC’s Park View neighborhood.
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Open trash and recycling bins lie in an alley in Park View, attracting rats.
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The couple said they saw rat poison kill a litter of foxes.
“We’re animal lovers,” Wood says. “It’s not just about seeing foxes, hawks, owls and the animals that everyone loves suffer. I don’t want rats to suffer either.”
Catrina Valente, on the other hand, is fed up. His garden was invaded by rats, making it unlivable. (She has the phone numbers of the city’s rat inspectors in her phone.)
“Rats live in this world like any other animal,” Valente said. “But it’s the disease, the uncleanliness, everything – I have no sympathy for them.”
Rats pose a public health risk, and rangers say they want them gone, too. They focus on behavioral solutions that do not use rodenticides. Their advice is simple: compost or use the kitchen garbage disposal to limit discarded food waste, put waste in outdoor bins just before collection and make sure the bins are secure.
Andre Pitman, DC’s program manager for the Rodent and Vector Control Division, leads a team of 16 inspectors who respond to requests for rat service (removal) every day. They total thousands of calls per month. In addition to using poisons, they began a pilot program of distributing liquid contraceptives at bait stations. But Pitman says even these measures aren’t enough.
“No one can do that,” Pitman says. “We can go out and treat all day, but if we don’t eliminate the contributing factors, they’re going to re-infest.”
The key is to educate residents about the need to remove rats’ food and water sources, he said. Keep yards and alleys clean – no mess, no litter. Other cities, like Boston and New York, are also looking into the education of human rats.
The Rat Rangers are hosting a walk in the Park View neighborhood of Washington DC to teach people about rat behavior and prevention.
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Rat Rangers teach residents that rodents have an excellent sense of smell, do not like new things, and quickly develop resistance to poisons.
Bobby Corrigan, a rodentologist in New York, says these creatures are intelligent. “(They) are some of the most successful animals on planet Earth,” Corrigan says.
He says humans are right to think about how to outsmart the rats. If he hears rats in his ceilings, he says, his first thought is not extermination but where did he go wrong in asking, “What did I do to cause you to come into my ceilings?”
So far, the Rat Rangers have taken hundreds of residents through DC’s maze of alleyways, past rotting garbage and hungry rodents.
Will this make a difference?
After the rat safari, DC resident Lizzie Stricklin says she wants to have a group chat with her neighbors to see what they can do to clean up their corner of the city.
“Do it as a community,” Stricklin said.
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