The present type of show fox-terrier is too big and too long in the
leg for ratting in hedges. Little dogs are called for, full of sense
and pluck, with wide heads, strong jaws, bully chests and short bodies
on short legs, which carry them as quick as lightning almost anywhere
among the thorn hedges. The keeper does not care for his ratting
terriers to hunt anything but rats--and the difference in the work of a
rat specialist and a general-purpose dog must be seen to be believed.
He does not enter his puppies to old rats, for the puppies may be badly
bitten, and perhaps their ardour and dash will be ruined, and they will
never look at a rat again.
The general-purpose terrier develops grave faults. If a rabbit or a
hare is started, he prefers giving chase to going on with the rat
business: he attacks ferrets as well as rats, and he prevents rats from
bolting by jumping about over the burrows and poking his nose into them
too freely. A terrier must be taught to restrain himself until a rat
has bolted. The keeper holds him down, cuffs and rates him soundly each
time he tries to go too soon, but gives lavish praise if he waits until
the right moment. After a time, the little terriers so well understand
the necessity for allowing rats to bolt that they will crouch as
motionless as statues, with their noses almost touching the edge of the
hole. So crafty was one we have owned, that she would crouch in this
way, with her body round the corner, out of sight.
All plans for the destruction of rats are welcomed by the keeper,
because rats are the most numerous of all egg-thieves. He heartily
joins the foxes, stoats, and weasels in their war on rats, though he
is for ever at war with his co-operators. He believes that there are
now more rats than ever, and has figures at his finger-tips to prove
the growth of the rat-plague. If, he argues, there were only one rat to
every acre in England and Wales, and if each rat did damage only to the
extent of one farthing a day, the loss in a year would be £15,000,000.
And he quotes a report which says that a single poultry-fancier in
Dorsetshire lost £80 in a year through rats; that the owner of a
flour-mill lost £150 in a year, through the gnawing of sacks alone;
that men have attributed their bankruptcy chiefly to rats; and that the
damage done by rats in this country is greater than the damage done by
the cobra and tiger in India.
The gamekeeper holds that there ought to be complete, organised
co-operation against rats over wide areas, and heavily blames the
farmers for not giving proper assistance to keepers in their rat-war.
By delaying over-long the threshing of their corn-stacks farmers
certainly give rats a grand chance to increase and multiply; and when
ricks are left unthreshed until April the rats leave them without let
or hindrance, to spread over the countryside as the weather grows
warmer, and food is to be found everywhere. The keeper argues that
ricks should be threshed betimes, to allow the rats to be properly
dealt with. A day or two beforehand he would have the rats which lie in
out-lying burrows, in neighbouring hedges, driven into the rick; this
can be effected by tainting the burrows with paraffin--a simple plan
is to blow in smoke from paraffin-steeped rags with a bee-smoker. Then
the keeper would have the rick surrounded by half-inch wire-netting. At
the time of the threshing he would like to be summoned to the scene,
and he would see to it that there were six or seven smart ratting-dogs
present, and that they were constantly supplied with drinking-water.
In one case where this plan was tried, six hundred rats were accounted
for from one rick. Even after threshing and rat-killing on these
lines, rats will be found, if sought, in hidden holes where the rick
stood--packed to suffocation to the number perhaps of seventy or eighty.
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