Not-So-Tim'rous Beasties

Be they plague rats, dray horses, elephants, pigs or poultry, we’ve always ‘eaten, beaten, worked and played with the beasts of London’. Claire Jackson discovers how animals have long made the city roar

- Claire Jackson

RATS scuttle across the wooden platform, watched by a crowd wearing top hats and cravats. One gentleman peers at a pocket watch as a black-and-tan English toy terrier tears through the enclosure, dispatching rodents left, right and centre. The dog is Tiny the Wonder, a Victorian celebrity that could kill 200 rats an hour in London’s baiting pits. It’s a potentially gruesome scene for a museum exhibit, but the life-sized version of the mid-19thcentury painting Rat-Catching at the Blue Anchor Tavern, Bunhill Row, Finsbury merely hints at the reality.

The rats are digital projections; the gambling men safely two-dimensional. Tiny, so small that he wore a ladies’ bracelet instead of a collar, looms larger in our imagination. The watered-down approach is entirely appropriate, because the display is part of ‘Beasts of London’, a special series of immersive installations at the Museum of London, created in partnership with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, to tell the history of the capital through its animal tales (or tails).

The indifference towards rats in the city was understandable. They were previously thought to have caused London’s devastating plague, although, as the exhibition discusses, we now know that the spread of disease was down to another animal: the flea. However, the animals used in rat baiting weren’t always London rats; many organisers favoured stronger specimens found in the neighbouring countryside. In time, rat baiting —to be distinguished from ratting, the legal useof dogs for pest control in an unconfined space—was considered cruel. Society’s changing views on animals offer a window into a broader understanding of history.