Happy National Rat Catcher’s Day!

Seriously. Today is National Rat Catcher’s Day. It’s actually celebrated on June 26 or July 22, depending on whether you are reading The Pied Piper (brothers Grimm) or the poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning. As you might have guessed, today celebrates rat catchers.

One of the most famous rat catchers was Jack Black, appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer to Queen Victoria in the middle of the 1800’s. He wore a scarlet top coat, waistcoat and breeches, with a huge leather belt inset with cast iron rats.

When he caught any unusually colored rats, he bred them, to establish new color varieties. He would sell his home-bred domesticated colored rats as pets, mainly, as Black observed, “to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages”. Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers, and she dedicated the book Samuel Whiskers to her rat of the same name.

The more sophisticated ladies of court kept their rats in dainty gilded cage and even Queen Victoria herself kept a rat or two. It was in this way that domesticated — or fancy — rats were established. Black also supplied live rats for rat-baiting in pits, a popular mid-Victorian past-time. (source, Wikipedia)

So now you know what well-bred young ladies keep in squirrel cages. So, go find a rat catcher to lavish your attention and adoration on, and have a very lovely day!!

­-posted by Miss Analiisa, who dedicates this post to Buddy, the family beagle, for killing that rat under the deck and delivering it to her earlier this week. Eeeew!