When Brian Love, 53, walks his miniature pinscher, Ziggy, through the Gayborhood, he often sees other people smiling at his dog. But then he realizes it’s because Ziggy is carrying a chicken bone in his mouth.

Love has complained to his friends about constantly needing to tussle with Ziggy over what the dog sees as a treasure. He has watched people toss chicken bones on the ground, and recently came across a pile of four bones on a mound of snow. Love wishes his neighbors would just use trash bins.

“It’s your food that you’ve literally just had in your mouth. Throw it in the trash,” he said.

Stephanie Harmelin, 43, has the same problem with her dog in West Philly, and she said she accepts the bony sidewalks as part of living in a city. She has seen aggressive squirrels rifling through trash, but also has come across bones at street corners and under park benches that appear to have been dropped by humans.

She said part of the problem is educational. Once, Harmelin pulled her dog away from a bone on the street, and two fellow walkers asked her why.

Harmelin explained how chicken bones are unsafe for most dogs to consume. Cooked bones splinter when a dog chews on them, and the sharp fragments may cause life-threatening damage as they pass through the dog’s digestive track.

One woman was shocked, and said she had not realized chicken bones were potentially dangerous to dogs when she had tossed them to the ground before.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838552&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49696063)

While it’s unclear if rats have a particular taste for fried chicken, the animals are among the least-picky eaters around and will take advantage of any food source, from human scraps to cannibalism. And Philadelphia is seemingly a good place to be a rat, being declared the eighth-rattiest city in the United States in 2025 by the pest-control company Orkin, measured by tracking its new residential rodent treatments.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838552&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486#49696077)