Rat Catching Although antivivisectionist reform groups successfully pressured city and state authorities to ban many forms of cruelty to animals, the sport of “ratting” continued to attract working- and middle-class crowds well into the nineteenth century. In this 1852 painting, an all-male crowd at the Blue Anchor Tavern on the outskirts of London lays bets on the trained Manchester terrier Tiny as he tries to kill two hundred rats in a single hour. Because they saw rats as verminous pests that brought filth and disease into Europe’s rapidly growing cities, the authorities tolerated rat killing for sport, a pastime that was a throwback to the inhumane bullbaiting and cockfighting popular in the early modern era (see Chapter 18).