These Jack Russells are very typical of the kind that English ratters have always used, and lurchers and retriever crosses can rat, too.
Highly bred and trained retrievers aren’t used to rat, though they certainly can do it.
The reason is that it teaches the dog to do a killing bite, also known as “hardmouth.”
However, there are retrievers that can adjust what kind of bite they use and can be used to retrieve live birds and to kill rats and other things.
One of the reasons why the curly-coated retriever got such a bad reputation for hardmouth is because they were owned by keepers as their personal dogs, which they used in ratting forays like this one.
Do people do this in the US also?
Oh yeah! My uncles on my mom’s side used to do it all the time. They called them “woodrats,” even though they were Norways.
When I was a kid, I came across the aftermath of a ratting, and ran up to the house shouting that one of the dogs had killed “the biggest mouse I’d ever seen!”
How would a person who is totally foreign to this world find people who do this and might let you go with them? Thank you in advance for the help!
I would contact someone in the JRTCA or another terrier club. Lots of terrier people rat.
Thank you!
No video I’m afraid, but a first hand account of someone using shar-pei for one of their traditional roles as a ratter.
Many kinds of dogs will rat. I even had a Crested bitch who did.
I have a friend who bought an old farm, infested with rats. She breeds MinPins (Miniature Pinschers), and they cleared out the rats with enormous enthusiasm – small and fast helps for ratting. A large dog is at quite a disadvantage as it can`t get into small spaces after them.
Elizabeth