Rats in Seattle: They’re creepy, clever and everywhere, but there is help

YES, RATS DO come up toilets. Yes, it’s a startling and scary image: those beady eyes, pointy front incisors, long scaly tails, their rhythmic sniffing. Sniffing for what?

Your doom, that’s what. You live in Seattle, a city that always ranks among the rattiest in the country.

Rats have always scared humans. At its worst, it’s called musophobia.

In George Orwell’s dystopian “1984,” about a bleak, totalitarian society, the protagonist is broken when a cage filled with hungry rats is placed around his head.

And in a just plain creepy scenario, you have a man whose home is in Magnolia and who makes this report to Public Health — Seattle & King County: “Well, we came back from a trip, and there was a dead rat in our basement toilet.”

The man concludes, “Reconsidering my wife’s desire to get a cat. Questioning a lot of things in life now …”

A rat in a toilet does raise existential thoughts.

The above report is from a July 2020 public records request to the agency. That year and in 2021, it got a dozen-and-a-half such spooky reports.

Here’s another one, from October 2021 in the 98115 Zip code, which includes Bryant and Maple Leaf. Rats are equal opportunists. Every neighborhood is good pickings.

“ … [W]e had a rat come up through the bathroom toilet in the living room that we discovered after hearing a noise coming from the toilet. We chased that rat out of the house and then again that same evening heard the same noise from the bathroom, and yet another rat had popped up in the toilet bowl, which we also chased out.”

SEATTLE ALWAYS MAKES the Top 50 Rattiest Cities List from Orkin, a national pest control company. The list is based on new rodent treatments done by the firm. Seattle bounces between No. 9 and No 11 (in 2022).

Not surprisingly, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are at the top.

Rats have gotten to be such a problem in the Big Apple that in December, the city advertised for a Rat Czar (official title: “director of rodent mitigation”), which paid $120,000 to $170,000. The ideal candidate was expected to possess “stamina and stagecraft” to defeat a “cunning, voracious and prolific” army.

From 2005 until late 2022, Seattle got more than 6,300 rat complaints, according to another public records request. It likely would have gotten more if residents had known where to complain. When 1,900 people responded to an online rat survey the agency prepared in 2022, a common response was, “I was not aware” it provided rodent services.

It does, with plenty of online tips at kingcounty.gov/rats, including, upon availability, “rodent prevention kits or … rodent prevention technical assistance.”

The agency’s small staff of three includes two inspectors who spend half their time dealing with rat complaints and the other half baiting sewers with small wax blocks that are dangled on a wire. The blocks, says the manufacturer of Talon Weatherblok XT, are “palatable to rodents” because of their “high-density grain content.”

They also contain brodifacoum, a lethal anticoagulant poison that results in internal bleeding. In this case, the dead rats end up washed away in the sewer.

Various rodenticides have been a source of controversy, with the National Pesticide Information Center, a cooperative between Oregon State University and the EPA, stating that secondary poisoning can result in birds such as hawks and owls that eat poisoned prey. The same holds true for cats and dogs, with the ASPCA recommending immediate veterinary treatment for pets showing such signs as “weakness, tremors and seizures.”

Seattle’s rat-baiting program was featured in a June 2022 research paper led by Xiaocong (Maggie) Guo in earning her master’s degree in occupational and environmental health at the University of British Columbia. She tracked more than 1,700 manholes here that had been geotagged for their location.

Conclusions: Older sewers have more rats, maybe because of disrepair or decay. Rats prefer pipes in higher elevations because they don’t flood as much during storms, flushing out food and rat nests. Rats like sewer pipes that aren’t buried very deep, likely because tree roots can penetrate them easier. Rats like sewer pipes that carry human waste — as disgusting as it sounds, they like eating it. Finally, also disgusting, rats like narrower sewer pipes because they’re more likely to get blocked up with human waste.

THOSE 6,300 COMPLAINTS in Seattle sometimes pit neighbors against each other.

June 2022, Shoreline: “ … [S]he is reporting her neighbor next door, who is having overgrown vegetation — blackberries and the grass is also a foot high on her backyard, attracting the rodents into the neighborhood. Complainant has been offering any kind of help to her neighbor to help to keep her yard clean, but she is refusing it.”

September 2022, Ballard: “We have a severe outdoor rat infestation … Their food is the half-dozen bird feeders that our neighbors have sited along our shared fence. They do not clean up around the feeders and put out peanuts and ears of dried corn for the squirrels. When asked to change their feeder practices, they declined … We have an astonishing amount of rat poop in our courtyard. The rats tunnel into our retaining wall and garden beds and leave large piles of dirt … We’ve spent over $1,000 trying to exterminate the rats, and the problem has only gotten worse. We’re worried the rats will eventually find their way into our home.”

The agency says that once a complaint is received, it sends out a letter to the property owner and in most cases conducts a visit. If rodents are found, a violation notice is issued. Owners can be issued three violation notices of at least two weeks each to do a clean-up. The agency prefers compliance through education.

After that a civil penalty is issued based on time spent by the inspectors — “at least $2,000,” says the agency.

In 2021, according to another public records request, six rodent code violation liens were issued, and in 2022 none through September.

THE RATS, AND MICE, that most commonly cause problems in our cities are not even natives.

There is the misnamed Norway rat — also called the brown, sewer or wharf rat — actually a native from northern China or Mongolia.

There is the black rat or roof rat, with a tail nearly always longer than its body. It’s native to India and possibly other regions of South Asia.

Then there is the house mouse, native to Central Asia.

The Romans called mice mus minimus (little mouse) and rats mus maximus (big mouse).

Wherever humans have gone, says Bobby Corrigan, a nationally known rat expert out of Westchester County, New York, these rodents have followed. Why not? We offer plenty of food pickings.

Starting in Asia, “Both rats and the mice likely hitched rides on wagons heading westward to Europe,” he says. From there, they hopped on boats going across the Atlantic to the East Coast, or on boats going from China to the West Coast.

Then settling in was easy. They just climbed down the ship mooring ropes.

That’s why, eventually, rotating discs were placed on the ropes. When a rat tried to climb over it, the disc began to spin, and supposedly the animal dropped in the water. But, as with other efforts to control the rodents, it was too late.

From tagging along on ships, “It became planes, trains and automobiles,” says Corrigan.

Give credit where credit is due.

“We’re the most successful mammal on the planet Earth. The house mouse is the second-most successful. Then rats probably come in third,” he says.

Corrigan has taken his Rodent Academy workshop for pest controllers to numerous cities, including Seattle. Corrigan certainly has the background, having published more than 160 technical publications in urban pest management.

Get used to these rodents, he says. They will always be with us.

For an April 2019 National Geographic story, Corrigan helped with a hypothetical example of how fast an urban rodent colony can grow.

With rats, “It takes them about three months before they themselves become sexually mature and start having their own family,” says Corrigan.

Starting out with a litter of nine pups, you’d end up with 11,907 rats by year’s end.

Of course, he says, “You’re never going to achieve that. Everything has natural checks and balances.”

SEATTLE’S BATTLE WITH rats goes back a long way.

We’re a seaport city, and we have a temperate climate. Nice for rodents.

By the time the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 was over — it began on the afternoon of June 6, when glue boiled over in a woodworking shop — the entire central business district was destroyed. A University of Washington paper on the fire said an estimated 1 million rats were killed.

There is no citation for that estimate, but the figure shows the extent to which the rodents had settled in.

After the fire, it didn’t take long for them to return. Six years later, a Feb. 14, 1905, Seattle Daily Times story carried this headline: “Rats! City Hall vaults invaded and valuable papers eaten up. Rodents swarm through municipal offices day and night.”

The rats were described as “as large as kittens.”

A considerably more serious rat event took place in 1907, when three Seattle residents died after contracting the bubonic plague, which typically happened after being bitten by a rodent flea carrying the plague bacterium.

The bubonic plague is still around, mostly in “rural and semirural areas of the western United States,” says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease can be treated with antibiotics, the earlier the better. The agency carries a long list of diseases spread by rodents, ranging from hantavirus to rat-bite fever.

The bubonic plague arrived in Seattle from thousands of rats living on ships that had traveled from Asia to San Francisco to here, according to HistoryLink.

An Oct. 22, 1907, Seattle Daily Times story told of Seattle offering a 10-cent bounty (about $3.20 in today’s dollars) for each rat brought in that was confirmed to be carrying the bacterium. When not enough rats were eliminated, a Nov. 8 story that year said the bounty was increased to $5 ($158 in today’s dollars).

The bounty was fine, warned an Oct. 23 Seattle Daily Times story that year, but, “Death to all rats is not enough.” It told how sewage from North End areas such as Fremont and the University District was dumped directly into Lake Union. It told of garbage-strewn alleys and backyards with just 35 wagons in the city for hauling by a “garbage trust” that “work when they please.”

By November of that year, Seattle had passed two ordinances to improve sanitary conditions, and one of the nation’s first ratproofing ordinances.

Another rat control effort by Seattle was a 1970 Model City project. A July 4 Seattle Times story from that year reported 274 tons of trash collected from the Yesler to Madrona neighborhoods, mostly by volunteers. Another story reported on middle-school kids drawing rat posters, with the grand-prize winner showing a rodent scurrying toward a hole at the bottom of a door: “Ready or not, here I come.” Nice try. The rats stayed.

THESE DAYS, THERE is enough rat business (as well as for insects, spiders, birds and other animal pests) for the state’s Department of Agriculture to have issued 508 general pest control licenses. You need to pass an exam.

Says Chris Somers, service manager for Rambo Total Pest Control out of Puyallup, “From what we’ve seen, the rodent problem has gotten worse. We actually saw a brief reduction during COVID, during the time that restaurants shut down. But since everything opened up, the rat activity has shot right back.”

(The business, by the way, is not named after the Sylvester Stallone movies. The owners are Luke and Tera Rambo.)

Somers asked clients whether they were willing to be photographed and interviewed for this story. No takers. “A lot of the time when it comes to pest activity, people can be a bit embarrassed and question what they have done to create the problem,” he says.

Marieka Klawitter and Fiona Lee, who live in a home in Phinney Ridge, were willing to be photographed. Not long ago, they greeted Nick Putman, a technician for Parker Eco Pest Control.

Their home has a basement redone as a full living area.

While there, “We heard the pitter-patter across the ceiling. I said, ‘I think that’s a rat,’ ” says Klawitter. Lee says that as she looked out the living room window, she could see a rat running across the fence separating them from a neighbor.

At one point, before calling the pest control company, the women stacked empty boxes at the bottom of the stairs, thinking that’d be too much trouble for the rat(s) to scramble over to get upstairs.

Putman placed snap traps inside the house and twice came out to plug holes outside with mesh screen and foam.

He also shared some of his rat encounters. There was the time he was sealing up a crawl space while a guy he was training was holding a flashlight. “The rats were running over, and he was having a tough time keeping the light straight. It didn’t bother me,” he says.

At the Phinney Ridge home, the women say no rat has since been heard inside their home.

The way Putman sees his job is that rats make a lot of us spooked.

“Honestly, it’s what keeps me busy. I’m not afraid of rats. It’s a game of comfort,” he says.

Say, on that comfort issue, what’s that noise in your attic? Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter.