What Does “A Pack of Rats” Mean?
“Pack” borrows language more commonly associated with wolves or dogs, group-hunting, coordinated, hierarchically organized, and applies it loosely to rats, whose actual colony structure shares some of that same organizational spirit even if rats aren’t cooperative pack hunters in the way canines are. It’s a fitting-enough borrowed term rather than a precisely accurate one.
Where the comparison holds up reasonably well is in rat colonies’ genuine social cooperation. Beyond the dominance hierarchies covered elsewhere on this list, rats engage in documented cooperative behaviors within their groups, including reciprocal food sharing, where rats that have received help from a colony-mate in the past are more likely to return the favor later, a finding that’s drawn real scientific interest as evidence of something resembling a basic sense of fairness or reciprocity in a species not typically given credit for it.
Example: “A pack of rats moved through the alley together, working the same stretch of dumpsters night after night.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Mammals · What Is a Group of Rats Called?