Washington is full of rats. These dogs are happy to help with that.
The sound of a rat screaming in the jaws of a terrier is the same sound that a stuffed squeaky toy makes.
It seems so obvious. Of course the toys sound that way, because that sound awakens something deep in a docile dog’s neurons that says: Shake it. Shake it till it’s dead.
It’s Saturday night. Flavia and Jigs, a duo of mother-daughter border terriers, are shaking a rat. It is already dead. On one side of the alley wall in a tony part of Northwest Washington, young people are drinking espresso martinis. On the other, a rogue group of dog owners is taking the city’s rat problem into their own hands, and their dogs’ mouths.
“Drop it,” says Susan Storey, the owner of the border terriers. “It’s dead now. Drop.”
“Who’s got gloves on?” asks Linda Freeman, the ringleader of the Ratscallions, a rat-hunting band of dogs and their owners.
“Who’s got the rat bag?” says Bill Reyna, a New York rat hunter who has traveled here with his rat terrier named Centauri.
The rat bag is a black garbage bag that the Ratscallions tote around in a wagon, along with a first-aid kit and water for their dogs. After a dog kills a rat, a member of the group will put on latex gloves, pick up the rat corpse by its tail, and put it in a bag, which, by the end of this particular night — after they have journeyed to a spot they have nicknamed “Hell’s Alley” — will contain 32 other bodies. Ratscallion tradition is to pose for a trophy photo behind the pile of their kills.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/interactive/2023/rat-hunters-dc-dogs/?
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