c. 1700 – c. 1955 · london, paris, new york · supplanted by municipal pest control
he was a private contractor in a leather waistcoat with sewn-in pockets. he kept a ferret in one and a small dog — a terrier, usually, almost always called jack — at his heel. he carried wire cages, a bottle of paraffin, a pouch of arsenic paste, and a notebook in which he wrote down what he caught and where. some kept the best rats alive for the saturday pits, where dogs were timed against them. one champion terrier killed a hundred in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
jack black, ratcatcher to queen victoria, wore a sash with the royal arms and a set of brass rats around his belt. his rivals walked the same drains. they knew the city by its cellars and the warmth of bakery floors. they could smell a nest at twenty paces. they understood, without sentiment, that a city is a colony of small movements that need to be tracked by hand.
then warfarin came in, in 1948. anticoagulants worked at scale and out of sight. the municipal department took over. the trade did not die so much as become anonymous — the man with the truck and the clipboard, the bait box at the back of every restaurant. the ferrets went to fanciers. the terriers stayed terriers.
field note · the dog was never named for the catcher. the catcher was sometimes named for the dog.