Imagine walking into your local township clerk’s office carrying a bundle of rat heads.
Not because you were making a threat.
Not because something had gone terribly wrong.
Because you wanted to get paid.
For much of the 20th century, that was perfectly legal in Michigan.
In 1915, the state passed Public Act 50, creating a bounty on common rats. Anyone who killed certain rats could collect money by presenting the heads to their city, village, or township clerk.
Yes.
Rat heads.
Apparently, Michigan had decided that if you wanted to solve a rat problem, sometimes you had to put a price on somebody’s head.
Michigan Declares War on Rats
Rats were a serious problem in the early 1900s.
They contaminated food, damaged buildings and crops, and were increasingly understood to be capable of spreading disease. Cities and public-health officials around the country were looking for ways to control them.
Michigan’s solution was refreshingly uncomplicated:
Kill a rat.
Bring in proof.
Get paid.
When the law was enacted in 1915, the bounty was five cents per rat. A contemporary Michigan newspaper reported that Governor Woodbridge Ferris had signed the bill and that the rat’s head would serve as proof of the kill.
Five cents may not sound like much today, but apparently there were enough enthusiastic rat hunters to make the program more than theoretical.
An old Ingham County financial report shows the county paid $205.85 in rat bounties during one reporting period in 1916.
At five cents apiece, that works out to 4,117 rats.
Somebody was busy.
Please Bring at Least Five Heads
Eventually, the bounty increased.
In 1919, Michigan doubled the payment from five cents to ten cents per rat.
And the law had rules.
You couldn’t simply wander into the clerk’s office clutching a single rat head and demand your dime.
The later version of the statute required bounty hunters to present at least five rat heads at a time. The clerk would issue a certificate for the bounty.
Then came perhaps my favorite part of the entire law.
The clerk was required to burn the heads.
Presumably this prevented someone from collecting the bounty twice.
It also meant that somewhere in the job description of a Michigan township clerk was, essentially:
Occasionally dispose of incoming rat heads.
Government work has changed.
There Was Even Rat-Bounty Fraud
Whenever money is involved, someone eventually figures out how to game the system.
Apparently, rat bounties were no exception.
By 1932, an Ingham County newspaper was reporting concerns that rats killed outside the county might be brought into Ingham County because the county was still willing to pay the bounty.
There was also an even stranger problem.
Some clerks reportedly accepted rat tails while others insisted on the legally required heads.
That meant an enterprising rat hunter could potentially collect once with the tail…
…and then try the head somewhere else.
The newspaper summed up the situation beautifully as a case of:
“Heads I win, tails you lose.”
You really couldn’t write a better line for this story if you tried.
The Law Just… Stayed There
As decades passed, exterminators, poisons, sanitation programs and modern public-health practices made the rat bounty increasingly unnecessary.
But nobody repealed it.
So it sat there.
Through World War II.
Through the moon landing.
Through disco.
Through the invention of the personal computer.
Through the launch of the World Wide Web.
Michigan still technically had a law telling local clerks what to do when somebody arrived with a bundle of rat heads.
By 2000, the Michigan Senate Law Revision Task Force was going through state law looking for statutes that had long outlived their usefulness.
The rat bounty was an obvious candidate.
Senator Thaddeus McCotter introduced legislation to eliminate it. He had an especially good reason: his mother, Joan McCotter, happened to be the Livonia city clerk.
He later recalled that she had expressed considerable disinterest in having to accept and dispose of dead rat heads.
Understandable.
The Rats Finally Won
On May 19, 2000, Public Act 108 officially repealed Michigan’s 1915 rat bounty law.
After roughly 85 years, the price on Michigan rats was finally lifted.
No more certificates.
No more ten-cent payouts.
And, perhaps most importantly for local government employees…
No more legally mandated rat-head disposal.
Final Thought
Michigan has had its share of unusual laws over the years.
But there’s something wonderfully bizarre about a state law that survived into the 21st century and essentially said:
Bring your local clerk five rat heads and we’ll give you fifty cents.
The law began as a serious attempt to combat a legitimate public-health problem.
It ended as the kind of forgotten statute that makes you wonder what other strange things are still hiding in old law books.
And somewhere, a retired Michigan township clerk is probably very grateful nobody showed up at the counter in 1999 asking:
“So… where do I put these?”
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