Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1884 — Great Rat-Catching. [ARTICLE]

Great Rat-Catching.

Duchaletet gives an account of probably the biggest rat-catching bout on record. An old proprietor of one of the slaughter-houses near Paris had a certain place entirely surrounded by walls, with holes only large enough to admit the passage in and out of the vermin. The carcasses of several dead horses were placed in this inclosure. The holes were quickly and quietly stopped after a small army of rats had gone into the dead-horse banquet. Duchaletet entered with a lighted torch in one hand, a club in the other. He could not hit amiss; wherever he struck he did good execution. When he had finished 2,600 carcasses awaited burial.- ,- ;v . ■ In tlie time of George 111. there used to be a royal rat-catcher, and in 1862 the Board of Health of Bristol gave a rat-catcherJf'2o a year for his services in cleaning rats out of the slaughterhouses. Two celebrated rat-catchers, Shaw and Sabin, claimed they each caught from eight to ten thousand a year. One of them had literary pretensions, and wrote an amusing book on the noble art of rat-catching. They haye many modes of catching them. One to imitate the noise they make; another to toll them into a room with food. The method of catching them with ferrets and terriers is well known. — Par{s letter.