Whiskers and Wire Cages- Rat Baiting

Rat-catchers perform a necessary if brutal service for human civilization, however their vocation also made possible spectacles of slaughter entertaining to Victorians of all societal circles. Despite the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835, such sport continues without penalty because of mankind’s hatred of rats, although a dog’s participation in these sports is distasteful to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

At its core rat-baiting tests a dog’s ability to quickly kill rats. Pubs and gambling dens often host nights of rat-baiting, but other establishments are dedicated solely to the sport with only meager refreshments for their clientele. The love of rat-baiting breaks through social barriers. Men and women from all classes pay the shilling entry fee to show off their dog’s pedigree and to enjoy the display of skillful violence. Rat-baiting dogs tend to be terriers, bulls, or a crossbreed of one or the other.

The sport is confined to the rat pit, a circular enclosure on the floor or a hole below it about 6-10 feet in diameter surrounded by wooden walls four feet high. The pit must be round to prevent rats from defensively cowering in corners, and to keep both dog and rats constantly in motion. Dog owners, dog fanciers, and dog sellers purchase a number of rats, usually 5 or 10, from the establishment’s rat handlers. Once the rats are all in, the sporting dog is loosed in the rat pit eager to kill. Dog owners can go into the pit to encourage and direct their dog, but they cannot purposefully touch the rats.

High-stake matches with well-known ratters owned by established trainers are the highlight of the evening with much wagering with the house bookie. These dogs face many more rats, usually in multiples of 50, and compete to kill the most rats in the shortest amount of time.  A timekeeper and referee enforce the rules. The referee also judges which rats are “dead”. They gather any rat mortally wounded but still breathing after the allotted time in a circle drawn on a on table or floor. Any rat able to crawl out of the circle after the referee swatted its tail three times did not count towards the dog’s total of dead rats. One rat killed for every five seconds the dog spent in the pit is respectable, one rat every 3 seconds is extraordinary. Winning dogs are awarded silver collars, a purse of winnings, and a host of fanciers interested in purchasing of their offspring.

Occasionally, rat pits feature spectacles of a more novel sort, such as dog or cock fights, dog- baiting, and other monstrous sport. Strangest of all, a depraved or desperate man frequents rat-baiting matches in London and wagers with spectators that he can catch and kill more rats with his teeth than the last dog in the pit. He wins a great deal of money.

Adventure Ideas

After a night of rat-baiting, the hosting establishment collects the rat carcasses and places them outside to be picked by up rubbish collectors in the morning. The last few nights, something or someone has been hungrily helping themselves to the dead rats.

Rat pits consistently host displays of violence, aggression, and death confined to the same location week after week. Any sources of dark magic nearby could feed on such potent destruction, although these dark energies would undoubtedly reflect back on the dogs, twisting their forms and instincts in subtle malicious ways.

A pretty gruesome setting detail, if I say so myself. Rats may be rats, but that’s very cruel. Sadly, this isn’t the only blood sport to which the Victorians subjected rats. Next week we’ll look at rat-coursing.

Whiskers and Wire Cages- Ferrets and Ratting Dogs

Rat-catchers almost never work alone. Many hire apprentices or partners to help cover more ground or to minimize the risk of injury during dangerous nocturnal work. Most commonly, rat-catchers use trained (if not tamed) animals to more efficiently track and corner unwelcome infestations.

Rats are terrified of ferrets with good reason. Their long lean bodies slide through tunnels and holes inaccessible to rat-catchers, and their sharp teeth kill rats with a single bite to the neck. The strong scent of their natural predator is often enough to scare rats into blindly running to safety.  Ferreting should always be undertaken during the day when the ferrets are alert and the rats snug in their dens. 

Careful breeding over hundreds of years makes game dogs, such as terriers, bull and terriers, schnauzers, pinchers, and old English bulldogs, perfect rat hunters.  A dog’s smell finds unseen rats and follows their underground tunnels from above. Hunting dogs chase down rats too fast for the rat-catcher’s net or crafty enough to escape it. Small gutsy dogs, especially terriers, follow rats into their burrows. Rat’s “lucky” enough to survive a dog’s first bite, die soon after from a neck broken by vigorous shaking held in the dog's teeth. All dogs used by a rat-catcher must have a license.

Aided by these natural abilities and instincts, the stratagems of rat-catchers reaches new levels of cunning, ferocity, and brutality:

Hosts of sewer rats climb up into homes through damaged drains or by eating through the clay used to cover the joining of two differently-sized pipes. Hunting ferrets released into the walls and foundation scares the majority back through the water closets or drains through which they entered. The drains and pipes should then be repaired and a few nights trapping catches any remaining rats.

When hunting rats in rooms full of hiding places some rat-catchers spend a week feeding the rats with oats or bread until they discover all the trails leading to their holes in the walls and floor. On their first night of trapping, they bring along two terriers. First the rat-catcher stuff rags into the rat holes trapping the rats foraging in the room. Then the rat-catcher releases one dog to hunt through the room startling uncovered rats into running for safety. The remaining terrier intercepts the fleeing rats until all the vermin are dead or caught.

When ferreting in a large building with many floors, rat-catchers tackle the job one floor at a time beginning at the top. The rat-catcher removes a floorboard at one end of the room and covers the entire hole with a trapping net. On the other side of the room, they pull up another floorboard and let the ferret through. The rats, terrified of the ferret, dash through the opposite hole into the net. Any rats remaining trapped under the floor can be scooped up by hand, or with a net mounted on a pole. A professional, well equipped rat-catcher can clear two floors a day using this methodology. Cayenne pepper or some other scent repellent to rats liberally sprinkled prevents rats from migrating back to floors already serviced.

When clearing a barn or warehouse without an internal water source, rat catchers search for the trail to water on which the rats habitually travel. After dark, they cut off the rat’s escape by hanging a long net around the side or all of the building. While the rats drink, the rat-catcher unleashes his dogs at near the water sending the rats scurrying directly into his nets. The dogs catch any remaining rats, and further rats on premises can be cleared by a couple of nights trapping.

Adventure ideas

The ferret’s love of stealing small items can lead to trouble. When a rat-catcher returned his animals to their cages after a day of ferreting he found one ferret clenching a strange bauble in its teeth. No one in the house claims it.

As if this was not gruesome enough, we have even more distressing misuses of animals next week. We’ll look at rat killing in Victorian sport next week.

Whiskers and Wire Cages- How to Catch a Rat

Obviously, the simplest method to catch a rat is with a rat trap. Most amateurs make the same mistake of planting the same trap in the same place with the same bait. A rat’s feral cunning learns from the deaths of its fellows. After one or two night’s good work the trap lays untouched, however, rat-catchers know how to make the most effective use of their resources.

At first, any traps set across a rat’s tunnels or tracks do not need bait. Once the rats grow wary of the traps, a small pile of sawdust mixed with oats camouflages the trap’s workings and lures the rats to their capture. Soot, tissue paper mixed with hayseeds, or aniseed works once the rats grow fearful of piles of sawdust. Never use a solid chunk of food, or the rat will simply pick up the food to eat later in its den. To prevent the traps smelling of man they should be handled as little as possible.

Tinkers, toy-makers, and rat-catchers manufacture a stunning variety of traps such as the simple wire basket with an opening at the top and no way to climb out, the wire cage with a mechanism to close door immediately after the rat’s entry, or the more gruesome steel-jawed traps designed to close as a paw rests a rat's weight on the pressure plate. Most professionals avoid setting lethal traps unless the infesting rats are sewer rats or worse.

A professional rat-catcher could plant 10-50 traps depending on the size of the building and the number of traps he owns. They quietly wait and watch, patrolling their traps in case of a catch. Once a rat is caught or killed they reset their trap and continue their vigil until a little after midnight when the rats become less active, however a rat-catcher should always put in an appearance bright and early the next morning both to collect his traps and to grab any rats captured later that night before they can escape by gnawing off a limb. Any rat that escapes from a trap in this way won’t be fooled by traps again. Rat-catchers try to eliminate infestations during January or February before the rats begin breeding with greater rapidity in the spring. This serves both to eliminate future generations and to avoid the hassle trying to catch young rats small enough to squeeze into any nook or cranny.

Despite selling their own lethal concoctions to rat-beleaguered families, very few rat-catchers professionally use rat poison in the city. You can’t be certain of an immediately lethal dose, leaving most rats enough longevity  to crawl back under the floor to die, leaving a multitude of hard-to-remove decomposing rat carcasses. The owners of the premises invariably blame the rat-catcher for the horrific smell, demand he removes the bodies, and never ask for his services again.

Adventure Ideas

The thieves carefully planned their heist and tonight’s the night! After breaking in they find small mounds of sawdust and oats in the hall and waist-high nets strung through doorways. They hear muffled yips and scuffles in the walls. Can they complete their robbery with the extra complication of a rat-catcher working on the premises?

All rat-catchers know the stories of Boksby the uncatchable three-legged sewer rat. Whenever traps activate by themselves, the rats avoid the bait, or a nasty old rat gets away on three paws, rat-catchers claim Boksby has returned for revenge. One tavern popular with rat-catchers even has a bounty for Boksby’s carcass.

Now that we all know how to catch rats, we can look at the essential animal allies of the rat-catcher. Next week, we’ll examine the many morally troublesome uses of ferrets and rat dogs.

Whiskers and Wire Cages- The Work of a Rat-Catcher

In Victorian England, hordes of rats invade every building to eat, proliferate, and destroy. As architecture and engineering advanced, rats found new ways to invade and new delicacies to eat and destroy. Skilled rat-catchers devised their own tricks to outwit nature’s perfect scavenger.

Some businesses prone to rat invasion (such as tobacco shops, woodworkers, or granaries) contract a rat-catcher by the month or year to handle infestations as necessary. The cost per year to retain a rat-catcher’s services ranges from 1 guinea (one pound and one shilling) to 5 pounds per year depending on the size of the building. For short-term jobs, rat-catchers charge by the night, 2-8 shillings.  All rat-catchers are self-employed, and these high-sounding prices cover the costs of traps, trap repairs, dogs, dog licenses, nets, net repairs, cages, and ferrets. While a simple bag is fine for collecting rats while checking traps, rats should be transferred into strong wire cages for transport and to avoid escape or harm.

Enterprising rat-catchers know a live healthy rat is worth more than a dead rat. Rats can be bred for distinct colorations as pets and curiosities, but most of the rats caught by rat-catchers are bought by purveyors of sport, such as Rat-Baiting or Rat-Coursing, for 3 pence a rat. At harvest time, rat-catchers leave the city behind to catch rats scavenging threshed corn and grain. Even a mediocre rat-catcher could collect 50 or more healthy rats a day with little trouble just by laying traps around fields and barns.

 Although lucrative, rat-catching is not pleasant work. Much of the rat-catchers work happens at night when rats are most active. A strange man prowling around a closed business at night with a directional lantern looks very suspicious, so most rat-catchers inform local constabularies before undertaking a night’s work. Rat-catchers spend long nights in cold, damp, and often unsanitary places, plunging arms into walls to pull out struggling rats, closing broken sewer drains, watching traps, and disturbing rat nests in high rafters. Most dreadful of all, are the inevitable rat bites which rat-catchers must accept as an inevitable hazard of their profession. In fact, you can recognize a rat-catcher by the multitude of scars covering his hands and face. Rats have strong jaws and long teeth which often bite down to the bone. Heavy leather breeches protect rat-catchers legs and ropes tied around their ankles prevent rats climbing up their pant legs, but most rat-catchers avoid wearing thick gloves so they can feel their work in the dark. Infected rat bites lead to swelling, throbbing, and putrefaction. Rat-catchers pragmatically treat their wounds by lancing open the infected area, cleaning it of pus, and applying a homemade ointment. Horrible fevers bringing rat-catchers to death’s door for a few weeks is all part of the job.

Adventure Ideas

All rat-catchers agree the worst job in London is the Guildhouse. As the home of the Worshipful Company of Hermeticists, the Guildhouse is full of thaumaturgical equipment, dangerous enchantments, and grumpy careless magicians. The building’s halls and rooms don’t follow the laws of nature very well, and nobody thinks to warn rat-catchers about the magical spells protecting certain corridors from prying eyes. Worst of all, the rats don’t behave the way rats should. Sometimes they breathe fire, sometimes they fly, and sometimes they talk.

Now that we have the basics covered, we can move onto the clever, cruel, and creative methods rat-catchers used to catch rats.

Whiskers and Wire Cages: The Rats of England

In the Victorian world divided by class, race, and nationality, the horror of rats unites all. Their fanged, disease-carrying bodies cause less fear than the damage and ruination brought by their ravenous appetites. Armed with experience, courage, the proper tools of the job, and strong stomachs, Victorian rat-Catchers labored to protect their clients, homes, business and property from infestations. We’re examining the work of rat-catchers and how they could be brought to the gaming table, but first we must first familiarize ourselves with their prey.

Broadly, there are two species of rats in the British Isles: black rats and brown rats. Black rats arrived in England with the Romans and are now found all through the countryside, scavenging in barns, fields, and along river banks. Brown rats, or wharf rats are a foreign species introduced to the British Isles sometime in the early 1700s. Brown rats are larger than black rats and will eat practically anything, two traits which help them thrive in cities, pushing the smaller species out to the country.

Professional rat-catchers further divide rats by habitat, health, and disposition:

-Barn Rats or Burrow Rats are always black rats caught in the countryside, and are cleaner and healthier than rats caught in the city. Their bites tend to heal cleanly with little danger of disease because of their diet of corn and feed. 

-Sewer Rats and Drain Rats are universally brown rats. Their horrific diet of scavenging in the sewer gives their bites a high chance of infection and blood poisoning. Even their fur carries disease, leading some rat-catchers to believe they are poisonous.

-Red Rats feed daily on flesh, such as discarded fat outside a tannery or scraps stolen from the dead horses fed to dogs kept in kennels. Their diet gives them a boldness and ferocity greater than other rats. If a variety of rats inhabit a cage for a night, only the red rats will remain alive in the morning,

- Some rat-catchers tell stories about “Blood Rats”, large vicious rats with hairless heads and long fangs, giving them a “snake-like head”.  These strange creatures supposedly steal into children’s rooms at night and gnaw at their extremities.

As sewers grow more efficient, fetid food sources flow out before they can be eaten, bringing sewer rats up to the surface. They crawl up drains and chew through lead pipes to scavenge in homes and warehouses. Rats nibble fine fabric and soft woods to wear down their teeth, ruining fine furniture, clothes, and furnishings. In farms, feeds stores, warehouses, grocers, and kitchens rats eat harvested goods, steal extra to take back to their nest, and spoil a great quantity more. Rats even kill poultry and steal eggs by rolling them to their nest, making the vermin a true bane to any chicken farm.

They thrive in the city, thanks to their terrific cunning and adaptability. Wherever one rat is spotted, dozens more lie in hiding. Rats breed quickly with litters of up to 20 pups and can become pregnant immediately after birth.  Some naturalists decry their extermination, believing a healthy population of rats in the sewers helps mankind by reducing the amount of decaying waste from which waft “sickening vapors” carrying plagues up from the drains, but when small piles of scat sprout up in the pantry, everyone calls the rat-catcher.

Adventure Idea

Each morning a certain anatomist finds that the books, tools, and chemicals in his dissection room have been moved during the night. He has taken more precautions to secure the room each day, such as locking the door, baring the windows and requesting constables to check his home’s exterior during their rounds. The only openings left are a few pipes the rats chewed open, but they couldn’t be possibly the culprits.

According to legend, basilisks and cockatrices are born when a toad or snake sits on a yokeless egg. What happens when a rat accidentally sits on a stolen chicken egg just before it hatches? A Ratalisk? A Cockatrat?

Next week we get down to business, by looking at the work of the Rat-Catcher.

Nourish and Extinguish- Salamanders in Victoriana

Victoriana is as much fantasy as it is rooted in 1850s history, so as I wrote about chimney sweeps my mind wandered into more fantastic waters. Fire elementals and medieval bestiaries kept popping up, but I didn’t have room for them in my previous posts. So now, here are some ideas and rules for Salamanders in Victoriana.

While many cold-blooded creatures thrive in heat, the salamander is truly Pyrophillious.  Unlike the amphibian of the same name, salamanders rest in blazing flames without burning or bother. Fire warms their blood, cleans their skin, and serves as a sanctuary for eggs about to hatch. Should a fire grow too hot for the salamander’s tastes, glands in its skin sweat a milky flame-quenching liquid, a teaspoon of which dripped into a fireplace quickly extinguishes all flames leaving only lukewarm ash and smoke. Salamanders wander into camps and homes in search of unattended hearths or open flames. Modern industry attracted salamanders out of marshes and forests into the cities of Europe and Asia in search of a nice warm fire.

A fully grown salamander spans 2-4 feet from their blunt nose to their thick tail and weighs between 30 to 70 pounds. Their four legs terminate with curiously human-like hands. Moist pitch-black skin mottled with bright yellow stripes or spots covers their long chubby bodies. Strangely, the temperature of the fire surrounding their egg when they hatch drastically affects their coloration and demeanor. If their fire grows too warm, orange or even red hues creep into the yellow patches and their ferocity grows to the point of attacking with little provocation. If the fire dies before they hatch, their pigmentation dulls to a dark brown and they have a more docile temperament.

A deadly poison covers a salamander’s skin, causing irritation, hair loss, and convulsions upon contact.  Prolonged exposure or ingestion brings death in minutes. Some medieval legends describe predatory salamanders killing a full grown man by leaping on his head, and rubbing their belly on his face. Paradoxically, the salamander’s excretions and skin save countless lives every year. Tanned salamander hide loses little of its inherent flame-retardant qualities. Salamander skin gloves protect engineers and craftsman attached to prestigious firms and the most successful chimney sweeps wear full suits of salamander skin when battling chimney fires, although many only claim to own a salamander suit in order to raise their credibility.  Salamander farms collect their excretions for fighting fires and a host of industrial applications.

Salamanders are not native to the British Isles. The nearest native population of Salamanders slither in the French countryside across the channel, despite the efforts of local hunters to rid their home of such a dangerous creature.

Salamander

Initiative: 8

Physical: 8

Mental: 3

Health Pips: 4

Special Traits:

Pyrophillious- Salamander’s bodies are adapted to heat and possess Armor Value 8 against any fire damage. A salamander may spend an action to extinguish flames touching its body.

Regeneration x3- (See page 294 in Victoriana 3rd Edition Rulebook) In addition to quickly regaining hit points, Salamanders can regrow lost legs or a lost tail a few days after their loss. A Salamander’s body loses its regenerative abilities at death.

Poisonous Skin- Any character touching a salamander with their bare skin must pass a Fortitude test against the poison’s potency of 8. Whether they pass or fail, the character’s skin exposed to the poison turns bright red and stings causing -1 to the character’s Dexterity.

On a failure, the character suffers -2 health per round and an additional -1 to their Dexterity. These effects continue until the character passes a Fortitude test (5 black dice), another character passes a Medicine test with 5 black dice, or the character’s death.  

Damage: Bite (2)

It was pretty nice to just come up with a monster this week after wallowing in horrid squalor, however we will return to the worst jobs of Victorian England next week with a look at Rat-Catchers. I hope you enjoy.

Bristles and Brushes- Luck and Divination

After plunging ourselves into all the disease, danger, and despair in the life of a chimney sweep, let’s consider some of the charming and strange lore connected to their profession.

The Luck of the Sweep

European superstition clings to a belief seemingly ridiculous to anyone familiar with the hard cruelty of the chimney’s sweeps life: Chimney Sweeps are Lucky!  Back in the 1700s, King George II rode in a royal procession until his horse began savagely bucking.  The king held on for dear life until a lowly chimney sweep ran forward and calmed the horse. The sweep left before the king could bestow a royal reward on his savior. Recognizing the sweeps profession by his soot-covered clothes, the king declared all sweeps to be lucky. Or in a strikingly similar story, a chimney sweep rescued King William the Conqueror from an out of control horse and cart, and that grateful king made the proclamation of luck. Of course, it could just be that the sight of a chimney sweep reminds everyone how lucky they are to not be members of that profession.

Practically any encounter with a chimney sweep (save for their visits to clean a chimney) imparts luck to those around them. If a sweep kisses a bride on her wedding day or if a sweep attends the wedding, the marriage will be happy. Passing a sweep on the street or shaking hands with a sweep transfers luck. Finally and most lucky of all is meeting a sweep on the street on New Year’s Day. Some sweeps make extra money attending weddings and selling handshakes to superstitious or desperate people. This belief opens doors that would remain shut to an ordinary member of the working-class covered from head to toe in filth.

Tephromancy and Capnomancy

In addition to cleaning and clearing a stopped up flue, chimney sweeps with a foot in the spirit world might perform oracular services. All over the world, civilizations current and ancient searched cinders, soot, ash, and smoke for clues about their future. Even Victorian Englishmen performed the rite of “Riddling the Ashes”. They spread ash over the hearth on certain holy days such as St. Mark’s Eve or Halloween and checked it the next morning for the footprints of any person in the household to die in the coming year (or the footprint of a future husband, or the footprint of a future child).

Reading the remains of a fire is called Tephramancy. Most traditions hold only the ashes of a sacrificial fire hold any meaning, but family life revolves around the hearth. A fireplace might have some very personal prognostications if someone took the time to look for them. Similarly to Tephromancy, Capnomancy divines the future through the movement of smoke. Chimney sweeps know how smoke should behave as a part of their profession. They would be the first to notice when it flows in a way it shouldn’t, gathers strangely, or turns the wrong color.

Adventure Ideas

A certain gambling den has been plagued by a string of incredible lucky streaks. Every night the house loses far too much money from bets on rat-baiting. The only connection between the lucky winners is the small dirty kid that pets the rat-terriers before they start.

No matter what precautions they take, the chimney sweeps make a mess whenever they clean out the chimney in Mrs. Swale’s boarding house. It’s odd how the soot only clings to items belonging to that mysterious tenant.

Next week, we’ll finish up by looking at a semi-mythological creature with interesting connections to the work of the chimney sweep: the Salamander.