I was looking around the net for rat related stuff when I stumbled onto this bit of history I hadn’t heard of before: in Victorian England, “rat baiting” in rat pits around the city was a popular form of betting entertainment. Wikipedia notes an account from a participant:
A hundred rats were put in it, large wagers went back and forth on whose dog could kill the most rats within a minute. The dogs worked in exemplary fashion, a grip, a toss and it was all over for the rat. With especially skilful dogs, two dead rats flew through the air at the same time...
The Wikipedia article has lots of illustrates of the set up at these disreputable venues, like this one:
This must have been the toff’s night at the rat pit. Other venues seemed to have looked rather rougher:
Anyway, the last rat pit was close in 1912.
I did not know that this was a Victorian form of entertainment.
Update: Here's a blog post about the last rat pit in New York, shut down in 1870 by the SPCA. I can't see anything about rat pits in Australia on Google, though.
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