The Rat Lady wasn’t born so much as formed. A lonely teenager on a military base sees a rat in a pet store. She buys it and sneaks it into her room and thus a love for one of nature’s most misunderstood and hated animals is born. She quickly discovered the loving nature and intelligence of rats and continued her bond with this unwanted creature long after graduation. One rat became two, then a cageful...until she had hundreds and hundreds swarming in cages in a Chicago apartment.

From the start, Samantha Martin, aka The Rat Lady, recognized the intelligence of her rodent friends. Starting with simple games of fetch, she soon had her furry friends jumping through hoops, playing basketball, bowling, and in an impressive display of devotion and skill, running up a ladder into a dollhouse to rescue a baby doll from a fake fire. The Acro-Rats were born but the Rat Lady soon wearied of the nightclub circuit in Chicago and expanded to foreign markets.

	Samantha has traveled to Italy with her trained rats and has provided all the rats used for two documentaries.
	She has crawled through the sewers and subways of New York, coaxing her creepy critters into performing specific choreographed actions for the camera.
	She spends her Halloweens laying in a specially designed coffin with dozens of her pets crawling all over her as guests scream in horror at the sight.
	She once got out of a speeding ticket when the officer asked her about her “Rat Lady” license plates and then recognized her from one of her many national TV appearances.

Samantha Martin, the Rat Lady, has added to her first cage of rats and expanded until she owns a small private zoo. She trains dozens of species of animals and has an impressive list of film and photo credits. But it’s the whiskered, scaly-tailed creatures of the night that fill most of the cages...and most of her heart.