Little tame creatures

“How did they allow them to keep rats as pets?” asked my editor at the end of my epilogue, when my nine-year-old boy cousins were racing indoors after a fortnight away, to check on their pet rats. “Were they even domesticated at this time?”

Well, yes. They were. And nine-year-old boys love rats as pets at least in part because it upsets the maids and bothers the adult female cousins. Not my boys’ mothers, of course, who are made of sterner stuff.

Rats as domestic pets might have been familiar in Europe as early as the seventeenth century, and this was certainly  the case in Japan. We have excellent documentation for domesticated rats in England in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the ancestor of many of today’s pets might have been raised by Jimmy Shaw or Jack Black. (This might not have been his legal name, but it is the name under which he was interviewed by Henry Mayhew. The interview the two men was published in a book titled London Labour and the London Poor.)

Jack and Jimmy were ratcatchers. He suppled live rats to the rat pits, a popular blood sport that didn’t end until 1912. Another lucrative income source for him was breeding from rats that had different coloured coats. He told Mayhew ‘I have ’em fawn and white, black and white, black white and red. People come from all parts of London to see them rats. They got very tame and you could do anythink with them.’  He sold them as pets or curiosities, mainly to young ladies. Jimmy Shaw was even more interested in the odd rats. If today’s pets are not descended from those kept by one of these two men, they no doubt originated in a similar way.

Laboratory rats appear to have been used in research from at least 1828, and probably were also saved from the rat pits or bred from such animals. The Albino rat often used in laboratories or as pets is also known to have been around for a while. There was apparently a wild colony of Albina rats in Bath in 1828.