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“Ever dream this rat?”
That’s the question posed on a West Philly flyer sporting a picture of a rat in a leather jacket smoking a cigarette and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“Every night, all over Philadelphia, hundreds of people see this rat in their dreams,” the poster reads. Below the text is a link that leads to a website showing a spinning pixelated image of a rat and nothing else.
It’s unlikely that Philadelphians are actually dreaming of this beer-drinking, cig-smoking rat, but there is some truth to the poster. Rats are on the minds of Philadelphians, and they have been for a long time.
Sometimes in broad daylight, rats are wrestling on sidewalks, rummaging through trash and scratching through the walls of Philly buildings. These rats are brave, and sometimes, in spite of their size, braver than us. Consider this harrowing tale from Annie Liontas, a writer based in West Philly who answered Billy Penn’s callout for rat stories:
“It was a frigid night in Philly, too cold to be on a bike, too cold even for rats. I blame myself — I had taken a shortcut down a trash alley in Old City so I could get home from work faster. I was pedaling hard, yet I still saw their little eyes blink from the dumpster shadows. They’d have eaten my breath if I let them. And there it was, a big one — coming right for me. It went under my bike, between the tires. I saw the flash of its body move beneath me. I don’t know how I didn’t hit it (proof, my wife tells me, of their intelligence). I felt its long tail whip against the faux leather of my boot, halfway up my shin. I screamed, “Only a Philly rat!” I can feel it even now, all these years later.”
Chilling, yet unfortunately not uncommon for Philadelphians.
Philly’s rat history
Rats have likely been scurrying through Philadelphia since its earliest days as a colonial port. Like many of the city’s earliest residents, they arrived from overseas, though not by choice. Black rats traveled aboard European trading ships as early as the 1600s, while larger brown rats, the kind commonly seen in Philadelphia today, followed.
A 2024 study found evidence that brown rats reached North America before 1740, decades earlier than previously thought. By the 1800s, they had largely displaced black rats in many East Coast cities.
Philadelphia’s bustling waterfront helped make the city a destination for more than just people and cargo. Ships carried rats, insects and diseases across the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes with devastating consequences.
In 1793, a yellow fever epidemic killed an estimated 5,000 Philadelphians, roughly a 10th of the city’s population at the time, sending residents fleeing and bringing the nation’s then-capital to a standstill.
The rats, however, weren’t to blame for that particular catastrophe. Mosquitoes spread yellow fever, a fact physicians wouldn’t establish until more than a century later. At the time, doctors debated whether the disease had arrived aboard ships from the Caribbean or originated in the city’s filthy streets and rotting waste. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia notes that the outbreak helped prompt the creation of a new city Board of Health in 1795.
A century later, rats sparked a new disease scare. Spurred by national bubonic plague outbreaks, Philadelphia launched a massive rat-control campaign in 1914. However, the rats were just carriers; the real culprits were the infected fleas they harbored, which bit humans and transmitted the bacteria.
Hoping to prevent an outbreak of its own, Philadelphia offered residents a bounty of 2 cents for every dead rat and 5 cents for every live one delivered to a collection station at Race Street Pier. By Jan. 1, 1915, more than 5,200 rats had been turned in. The city also assembled a “rat patrol” to inspect incoming ships and place traps along the waterfront. Philadelphia ultimately avoided a plague outbreak.
The fight continued. In 1969, Mayor James Tate launched the Philadelphia Rat Control Project after the city recorded 8,576 rat complaints and 91 reported rat bites that year. Its public education campaign included a particularly blunt 1971 pamphlet titled “Meet Your Enemy … The Rat,” instructing Philadelphians to kill, poison and exterminate the rodents.
A rat czar
City Hall is taking a new approach to Philadelphia’s rat problem. Last week, the city named veteran Department of Public Health employee Adrian Jordan its first rat abatement manager, tasked with coordinating efforts across city agencies rather than relying solely on individual complaints and extermination.
The initiative will begin in Oxford Circle, Castor Gardens and surrounding Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods, where inspectors will go door to door looking for infestations, even at properties where residents haven’t reported rats. Jordan will also hold regular meetings with five other city departments to address problems that might otherwise get lost in the bureaucracy.
The city plans to launch a public dashboard tracking complaints, residents contacted and properties serviced. City Council, which passed a resolution Oct. 8 urging officials to treat Northeast Philadelphia’s rat problem as a public health and quality-of-life emergency, has also called for stronger enforcement against property owners who repeatedly fail to address conditions attracting rodents. The city has yet to announce additional staffing or a timeline for expanding the initiative.
But rats aren’t confined to the Northeast, and Philadelphia’s problem extends well beyond the neighborhoods targeted by the initiative.
On Orkin’s “Rattiest Cities List,” based on residential rodent control requests, Philadelphia ranked No. 9. The city placed third on Terminix’s list, behind only New York and Los Angeles. Neither ranking represents an actual count of the city’s rats.
“Philadelphia’s rat problem is largely driven by the challenges that come with a dense urban environment,” said Tino Martinez, Orkin’s Northeast regional manager.
He pointed to unsecured garbage, overgrown vegetation, vacant properties and openings in buildings as conditions that allow rats to thrive. Martinez added that the rodents can “squeeze through openings as small as a quarter,” making even minor structural gaps potential entry points.
Rats a problem in West Philly
In West Philly, BP reader Irene said uncontained trash, abandoned buildings and street repairs that disrupt rats’ normal habitats have caused an influx in the local rat population. Her neighbor, she said, had rats chew through their car engine. Rats chew through car wiring, hoses and other parts because their constantly growing teeth need to be worn down, and the warmth and shelter of an engine compartment make it an attractive place to nest.
“Our neighborhood group chats are now basically rat chats. We’ve made many calls and reports to the various city agencies that handle these types of reports,” wrote Irene to BP. “It’s a confusing web of bureaucracy, and the responses range from nothing to underwhelming.”
“I just want to walk outside and not feel like I need to brace myself for a rat sighting!”
Kelli, also in West Philly, says she’s seen rats “take over” Clark Park in recent years.
“There’s nothing like watching them go in and out of the drainage tunnels on the wall that surrounds the big kid play structure or telling your three-year-old to watch out for the dead rat(s) in the middle of the path while they are on a balance bike,” Kelli wrote. “Often, you can see them just 10-15 feet away from folks picnicking or hanging out on a blanket near the bowl. They seem to grow more and more bold, which makes the playground a bit concerning.”
Also in Clark Park, Hanh La said she’s seen rats take advantage of open trash and nearby residents throw their own rat poison into the park and surrounding streets — which may be doing more harm than help.
“The park is a hub for the community and has a playground for children,” wrote La. “This is a quality-of-life and health hazard for our community!”
In La’s message to BP, they included a screenshot of a Facebook post from user Kelsyn Kats in a West Philly group that warned of loose rat poison in the area that their dog ingested, sending them to the veterinarian.
No silver bullet, but solutions
Nobody knows exactly how many rats call Philadelphia home. But the city’s Health Department receives roughly 4,000 suspected rat complaints annually, with about half confirmed as infestations. Despite seemingly growing concerns among residents,city officials say they haven’t documented an increase in confirmed rat complaints. That doesn’t necessarily mean the number of rats hasn’t grown; complaint data alone can’t reliably establish how many rodents are living in Philadelphia.
Whether Philadelphia’s latest approach will finally make a dent in its rat population remains to be seen. But Jason Munshi-South, an urban evolutionary biology researcher and rat expert at Drexel University, says the city’s decision to appoint someone to coordinate its efforts is a promising start.
“I think it’s a productive approach,” said Munshi-South. “You have different agencies that are responsible for pest control in different settings and they don’t talk to each other … so you really need somebody who brings those people together and basically gets them to agree on what they’re going to do. And so if they can do that, I think it’ll be a positive step forward.”
New York City has taken a similar approach, targeting rat-heavy neighborhoods with proactive inspections, coordinated efforts across city agencies and stricter sanitation enforcement. The strategy has shown some promise: rodent complaints in four targeted neighborhoods fell nearly 6% between the first halves of 2024 and 2025, while a broader push to require sealed trash containers coincided with a 20.6% citywide decline in reported rat sightings over a subsequent 12-month period.
According to the Drexel professor, Philly’s warming winters that normally quell rat populations and the large amount of unsecured trash has made the city susceptible to rats. When they’re not tearing into trash, Munshi-South says the rats are highly social and interact with each other during most of their waking hours which is mostly at night.
“They do exhibit a degree of intelligence that I think is interesting for such a small animal,” said Munshi-South.
He said traps are largely ineffective against rats, which are “neophobic” and scared or cautious of new things entering their environment. Removing access to food and cleaning up trash can help.
According to Munshi-South, rats typically stay within about 100 meters of where they were born. That means clearing a few blocks of rats doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Without continued treatment of surrounding areas, rats can move back in within months, he said.
“You’ve only bought yourself a little bit of time,” Munshi-South said. He warned that targeting individual hotspots without addressing surrounding neighborhoods could turn rat control into a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
The fight against rats is largely a fight against reproduction. A single female rat can produce seven litters annually, with each litter containing six to 12 baby rats. Rats can start reproducing as early as 5 weeks of age.
In October, PETA proposed rat birth control to Philadelphia that would be continuously ingested in solid or liquid form by the rats.
Whether or not rat birth control can effectively control populations on a large scale remains uncertain, though early trials have shown encouraging results. Cities including Baltimore, Chicago and Washington have experimented with contraceptives for rats. In two D.C. neighborhoods, researchers reported a significant decline in rat activity after introducing ContraPest, while a Boston pilot program using a different product, GoodBites, reported a 60% reduction in activity. Philadelphia rejected PETA’s offer, stating that there was no solid evidence that rat birth control worked.
A rat race with no finish line
Not everyone wants rats out of Philly.
Billy Penn’s Instagram post asking readers to share their rat experiences drew a healthy crowd of rat advocates. Roughly a fifth of the comments on the post seemed pro-rat.
“I’m not ratting out nobody,” commented Instagram user Palaeoamber.
Lynzi, a BP reader who answered the callout, attached videos to their message showing them approaching a baby rat or mouse and dropping some food for it.
“We don’t have a rat problem, they aren’t the problem. They’ve been here as long as we have and I argue they’re citizens as much as us. We have a TRASH problem,” wrote Lynzi. “We’d see less rats if there was less trash.”
While feeding rats on the street might not be the best solution, Lynzi has a point: Philadelphia’s rat problem is as much about the city itself as it is about the rodents living here. Rats have survived centuries of traps, poison and public health campaigns, making the most of the food and shelter Philadelphians leave behind.
They’re resourceful, stubborn and remarkably good at surviving in a difficult city. Some might even call them Philly underdogs.
For now, they’re not going anywhere.
Maybe hundreds of Philadelphians aren’t dreaming about a cigarette-smoking rat in a leather jacket. But after centuries of sharing the city, it’s understandable why the real ones are difficult to get out of their heads.
