Most people don’t know this: the friendly “fancy rat” you see in pet stores was a wild sewer rat less than two hundred years ago. Nobody set out to make a pet of it. It happened almost by accident, through a cruel blood sport and one famous rat-catcher who kept the tame ones. It’s a story worth knowing, because we’re doing the same thing right now with the roof rat.
It started in the rat pit
The story starts with the rat pit. By the 1800s, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), also called the Norway rat or sewer rat, had spread across Europe and pushed out the older black roof rats. It was everywhere, and people hated it. Rat-catchers made a living clearing it out of homes and barns. Instead of just killing what they caught, many of them sold the live rats for rat-baiting. That was a gambling sport: they put a terrier in a pit full of rats and bet on how many it could kill in a few minutes.
It was a brutal business. But it had one side effect nobody planned. It put huge numbers of live, wild rats into the hands of people who handled them every day. And those people noticed that some of the rats were unusual. A patch of white. A fawn coat. A black-and-white “hooded” pattern.
Jack Black, rat-catcher to Queen Victoria
The most famous of these rat-catchers was Jack Black, from Battersea, who called himself “rat-catcher to Her Majesty.” We mostly know about him because the journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed him for London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. He was a real character. He hunted with ferrets and dogs, kept a pet badger named Polly, and said he had been bitten “nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you.”
Here is the part that matters. When Jack Black caught a rat with an unusual color, he didn’t sell it to the pit. He kept it and bred it. Over time he created new color varieties, put ribbons on the tamest ones, and sold them (in his own words) “to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages.” Court ladies kept them in fancy cages, and Queen Victoria herself is said to have kept a few. Beatrix Potter was probably one of his customers (she dedicated The Tale of Samuel Whiskers to a pet rat of that name). Another showman, Jimmy Shaw, was doing the same thing in London. Between them, these men started most of the coat colors that fancy-rat keepers still know today.
So the pet rat came from a simple choice: keep and breed the tamest, “fanciest” rats out of a wild species that everyone else despised.
From novelty to “the fancy”
That choice slowly turned into a hobby. On October 24, 1901, a woman named Mary Douglas asked to show her pet rats at the National Mouse Club’s exhibition in Aylesbury. Her black-and-white hooded rat won Best in Show, and rat-keeping finally had a respectable home. The National Mouse and Rat Club followed. The hobby came and went over the next century, and in 1976 the National Fancy Rat Society was founded in England to bring it back.
The word “fancy” is a leftover from those days. A “fancier” was someone who loved breeding a particular kind of animal, and “the fancy” was the hobby itself. So a “fancy rat” literally means a rat kept by the fancy. In just a few generations, people turned “sewer vermin” into a family pet, mostly by choosing the tame ones. The fancy rat in the pet store is a domesticated wild rat, and not even an old one.
Why this is a roof rat story
Here is why this matters to us. The fancy rat is the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus. Its cousin the roof rat (Rattus rattus, the black rat) was the main rat in Europe for two thousand years, until the brown rat pushed it out. But nobody ever did the same thing with roof rats. A captured roof rat might learn to trust you, but its babies were born wild again. No one had bred them, generation after generation, for tameness.
There is an irony to that. Rat-baiting happened in a pit, with the crowd betting around the rim. That works fine for a brown rat, which lives on the ground and stays down where the dog is. But roof rats are arboreal. They evolved to live in trees, and when something frightens them their instinct is to go up, not along the ground. They climb and jump better than just about any other rodent. Tip a load of roof rats into a pit and they would pour straight up the walls and out, and the betting gallery would be overrun with escaping rats. So roof rats were no use for the sport, and nobody trapped them by the thousand the way they did brown rats. That was good luck for the roof rat, but it may have cost the species its shot at becoming a pet. The brown rat’s usefulness in the pit is exactly what put it into people’s hands in huge numbers. Out of all those captured rats, the friendly, “fancy” ones were kept for ribbons, gifts, and breeding, and the rest were thrown to the terriers. The roof rat never entered that pipeline at all. The accident that created the fancy rat skipped right past it.
We are doing that work now, on purpose. We are breeding our roof rats to be genetically tame: tame from birth, the way a fancy rat is. It is the same thing Jack Black started with the brown rat, just one species over, done deliberately, and without the rat pit.
The law has not caught up, either. The fancy rat was domesticated so long ago that everyone forgot it was ever wild, so it is accepted everywhere as a “domestic rat.” The roof rat is the same story, just one species over, but it is sometimes still treated as “wildlife,” even when it is a tame, captive-bred animal that has never been outdoors. (Florida is a good example.) Want to know where your own state or country stands? We mapped it: see Are Roof Rats Legal?
The next fancy rat
We already know how this turns out, because it happened once before. People ended up loving an animal their great-great-grandparents would have thrown to a terrier. We think the roof rat is next in line. If you would like to meet one, or help carry the line forward, our adoptions are always free. You can start with the care guide, or read the fuller story of how we domesticated the roof rat.
Filed under The Line & Domestication
