MEN AT WORK: The Rat-Catcher

Death to the rats!

Once again, we take a deep dive into those unsung men of yesterday who diligently maintained civilization throughout history. In previous essays, I have written about hotel detectives and gandy dancers. In this short essay, we are going to examine a profession that many of us would find distasteful but was absolutely necessary for urban public health: the humble rat-catcher.

Before there were credentialed experts, i.e. public health officers…the public relied on rat-catchers to keep the pestilence quotient to a minimum. In the West, the ancient Greeks were the very first to discover how much a nuisance rats can become in an urban environment. When the Greeks began storing grain, rat infestations became a serious concern. The Greeks didn’t employ any specific professionals though, they used cats and other neutral predators to find and kill these pests. Later on, they also utilized certain herbs and sulfur.

Did you know that a female rat only needs less than 24 days to birth a litter? They make rabbits look chaste in comparison. Rats were such a vexation that large towns and cities started paying a bounty for their corpses. So, a new job class was born; rat bounty hunter. In medieval Europe, the rat-catcher was an important part of any urban landscape.

In feudal France, many rat-catchers were nomadic and would walk from cities to town shouting their anthem; Mort-aux-rats or Death to the rats! They could also be identified by a staff they carried which were hung with the bodies of dead rats on it, as well as carrying boxes of traps and cats (the first rat terrier).

For medieval folk, how the itinerant rat catcher went about his profession must have seemed like magic to them. Some were even said to deploy special spells against the rats. Maybe this is the origin of the most famous rat-catcher in European history: The Pied Piper of Hamelin?

What is amazing is that by the time of the Victorian period in merry Old England, the professional rat-catcher had developed many methods of killing even the wiliest of rats, from specially trained canine terriers to ingenious traps and special poisons. Some even utilized rifles.

Many cities would also have their own professional rat-catching force. Even now, in NYC, due to their ever growing sanitation issues, a recent rat czar position has been created to deal with the vast army of rats throughout the five boroughs.

By the 19th century, a rat-catcher was actually considered a respectable working man occupation. It was not a desirable job due to the fact that rats nest in disgusting places and the chance of being bit by a disease infested rat was high. Also, very few men wish to spend their day in urban sewers. However, the pay was steady and you could be your own boss.

Unfortunately, this led to a certain level of fraud. Rat-catchers, in order to pad their bounties, would breed rats and then kill them. If you could slip in a few rats that you bred and killed yourself to the dozen you killed in a sewer, you now increased that government payout.

Nowadays, we have a less romantic figure to deal with the rats: your local pest exterminator. Many national pest control companies exist to spray your home and yard with all sorts of noxious chemicals. No more dogs, cats or specialized traps. Although, I have shot a rat or two in my time with a .22 magnum. Pest control techs now just use a lot of heavy duty poison. In my area, they tend to wear neat khakis and clean polo shirts. That’s modernism for you; sanitized and standardized!

The next time you see a huge rat staring at you in the middle of the night, before you scream and run away, think about those fearless rat catchers that once roamed the alleyways of your city, hunting these nasty demons of the sewers.

Mort-aux-rats!

My book: Darkness Over the Potomac: Stories of Hard-Boiled Horror

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