I use the cheese wand and tell the rats to retrieve items from a chest and deposit elsewhere and no matter what command they are set on, they just sit there. It's a huge problem for the chef rat because he can't get food from a chest to cook it, and he can't deposit it after it's cooked if you drop it for them which just locks them up.

After messing around some more I realized that you have to restart for the rats to accept the command to pull/deposit from chests. Very much a pain on servers not so much on singleplayer.

Fixed in 5e55839