Decoy them with jerky.Even more fun to cluster some jerky then throw a grenade when they go for the bait.Jerky is supposed to work on dogs, too.
It was quite.... annoying... at least, as i thought i'd go look around vault 13 and then get surrounded by rats, which didn't attack me first at all until walking through hex of no return.The problem was, i'm on level 3 (4 after getting my stuff back from there) and had 45 hp max (imagine getting surrounded by 10 rats which deal 20 dmg per hit). It was a pain to get the items back, but in the end i got them by using a combat knife to stab the living **** out of the rats. (Melee/stealth class...)And thanks for the info about zones.
Has V13 always had rats? I don't go there much, but I don't remember ever seeing rats there.