It’s one of those hot Sacramento evenings in August where, even after the sun goes down, you’re still sweating. But the dogs don’t seem to care.
Within minutes of starting their hunt, they’ve already sniffed out a group of rats hiding beneath some bushes at Cesar Chavez Park in Downtown Sacramento.
“Creature, here,” shouts Austin Isgitt, one of five people who’ve brought their dogs out tonight. He’s addressing his jagdterrier. “Get it!”
He gestures over at a bush, which Creature quickly races toward — and, within seconds, finds and kills the rat hiding beneath it. Over the course of the next couple hours, Creature and the other dogs on patrol will have caught over a dozen rats.
For years, Sacramento has ranked high in lists of the country’s most rat-infested cities. And if you’ve lived here for a while, it’s probably no surprise to hear that they’re scurrying around city parks and other public places.
But cities are far from alone in their rat problems. In other parts of California, rats are wreaking even more havoc — like in the Central Valley, where almond growers say a surge of the rodents is causing millions of dollars in damages.
Some locals are taking matters into their own hands (or paws). Isgitt is one of five members of the Sacramento Rat Annihilation Team — more often referred to as SCRAT — that began their patrol just after sundown. He says his time in the group has made him see the world around him a little differently.
“Every time I see a little Iris bush or something like that, I'm looking around and I'm like ‘Okay, are there pizza crusts in here? Are there rat holes? If I was a rat, would I want to live here?’” Isgitt says.
Emily Iniguez, the founder of SCRAT, helps the dogs on patrol by pushing a rat out of a drainage pipe Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, in a downtown Sacramento alley.Gerardo Zavala/CapRadio
The group officially formed in 2022. But the SCRAT’s founder Emily Iniguez got the idea a little earlier than that, in late 2020, when she adopted her patterdale terrier Raven.
When she brought Raven home, the terrier got to work at hunting every rat in her backyard. It was obvious she liked the work, Iniguez says, so the idea for SCRAT initially sprouted from her desire to help her pet lean into those instincts.
Then, after hearing of a similar group doing this work in New York City, Iniguez officially launched SCRAT. She says she’s learned a lot about local rats since then.
In the middle of the city, for example, she says the group is more likely to come across burrowing Norway rats, also called brown rats. That’s the kind that the dogs are most likely to come across hiding in holes they’ve dug under bushes or other nooks and crannies.
But if you’re further out in residential areas, Iniguez says you might come across black rats, also known as roof rats — the kind you’re likely to find scurrying across power lines or fences.
“I'm able to tell the different species now, where they're most likely going to be, how to catch them,” she says.
Visualizing a whole new world
As far as Iniguez knows, there aren’t many groups like SCRAT along the West Coast. But that doesn’t mean the practice of working with dogs to hunt down pests is anything new.
Mark Vick, assistant director of programs at the nonprofit Working Dogs for Conservation, says some dog breeds — including some represented in SCRAT — were originally bred to hunt down pests. Farmers in particular historically used them to rid their crops of rats.
But in the last decade, Vick’s seen their use expand beyond that. He’s personally worked with dogs to detect the presence of rats and mice on boats in order to prevent them from being transported from one place to another.
It’s taught Vick a lot about just how good these dogs can be at spotting rats. He says they can detect things humans might miss, like small droppings or even oils secreted from the rats’ skin.
A dog with SCRAT stands next to a rat he killed Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, at César Chávez Park in Sacramento.Gerardo Zavala/CapRadio
“With the proper coordinated training with the dog, it allows us to kind of visualize, in a way, a whole new world that we wouldn't be able to with our human senses,” Vick says.
But doing this work on a boat or a farm is a lot different than doing it in a city filled with rats.
“They're smelling all these odors from rats and mice and they have to work through all that odor to discriminate the hotspots, like where are the higher concentrations of odor,” he says.
Scott Mullaney, co-owner of Unique Pest Company with his wife in Washington D.C., has been working with dogs to provide canine-assisted rodent control since 2012.
The work, he says, requires a lot of in-depth knowledge about both the dogs you’re working with and the pests you’re managing. That’s why he says he’d like to see more regulations around the work.
“One of the things I'm pushing for is to have states and as many cities as I can get to regulate it,” he says.
He says interest in his work has only grown since he started doing it.
“We've never had a down year business-wise since we started,” he says.
Managing an ‘infinite sea of rats’
Niamh Quinn, a human-wildlife interactions advisor with the University of California's Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, says the huge number of rats in cities is exactly what makes them so hard to address. And the tools we do have for handling rats don’t really get to the root of the problem.
“They're just everywhere,” Quinn says. “People have this understanding that you can go out and you can trap a few rats and that's your problem solved, but it's not really. We're just kind of skimming off the top.”
She says understanding the different kinds of rats is core to managing them. But that’s also part of the problem. While there’s always interest in getting rid of rats, there’s often less interest in studying them, which can lead to some gaps in knowledge.
“There's so much to learn and there's not a lot of people researching commensal rodents anywhere in the world, never mind just in the U.S., so we really don't know a lot about what we're trying to manage, which makes it really, really difficult,” she says.
Part of the work, for now, involves continuing to test out different solutions and measuring how effective they are at reducing the density of rats in a given area. Quinn says she’d like to see that kind of research looking at the effectiveness of groups like SCRAT.
“I think it has potential as a tool but it needs to be more formalized,” she says. “And I think that it would be great for someone to actually look and see if these groups … are actually making a dent in this infinite sea of rats.”
At the end of the day, the members of SCRAT aren’t expecting to eradicate all the rats of Sacramento. Most group members say their primary reason for joining SCRAT revolves around their dogs rather than the rats themselves.
SCRAT dogs hunt for rats Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, at César Chávez Park in Sacramento.Gerardo Zavala/CapRadio
Olivia Hsia, a member of SCRAT, says the group allows dogs like her own rat terrier Joe to do what breeds like Joe’s were trained over generations to do, and lean into their natural instincts.
“I think it's the most natural thing in the world,” Hsia says.
Isgitt says he was drawn to the group for similar reasons.
“Terriers are not bred to be pets that are sitting on a couch all day and going for a 15-minute walk at the end of the day,” he says, referencing his own jagdterrier Creature. “If that's all the time I could have to give to these dogs there's no way I would get a terrier, like ever.”
Iniguez says what really keeps her coming back is the community she’s built with other members of the group. At times, they’ve been able to respond to community requests and address areas with a lot of reported rat activity. In some cases, they’ve even driven out of the city — like on a recent visit in a rat-infested area in Vallejo.
But alongside all of that, she says it’s also just nice to see her dogs happy.
“They know when I'm putting on specific clothes, when I'm grabbing my boots or whatever, when I start charging the flashlights — they're like, okay, we're going ratting,” she says. “They’re very excited.”
