Hunting rats with the dogs and men of the Tweed Valley Rat Pack
A day out with the terriermen of the Tweed Valley Rat Pack is a life-affirming experience, discovers Richard Bath
‘She loves it, just loves it,’ says Moray McHattie as he takes his wriggling Parson Russell terrier Gwynn out of the cage strapped to the back of his quad bike. ‘As soon as I put on my boots and get my gear ready at 6am she knows what’s happening. From then it’s game on.’ We’re outside a steading in East Lothian on a freezing cold Saturday morning, with an icy wind tearing down the glen and depositing tiny flecks of snow on the assembled party. I’m with the Tweed Valley Rat Pack and we’re a motley crew: the bipeds are made up of me and half a dozen veteran countrymen in camo gear and beanies. And there are dogs, lots of dogs. They are mainly noisy terriers of all hues – Parson Russell, Patterdale, Lakeland, Border - but there’s also Deeta, a friendly five-yearold wire-haired German pointer, and Jay the lurcher.
If the dogs are in various states of excitement, ranging from uncontrollable trembling and whining to full-on howling hysteria, it’s because we’re here to do what these terriers were bred to do: we’re going ratting.
We’ve been called in by Bruce, a keeper whose release pens on the hills have become infested with rats. It’s a family shoot but one where up to a tonne of grain a day is put down, with much of it now disappearing into the gullets of his unwelcome and increasingly expensive interlopers. With the increasing prevalence of Weil’s disease – a potentially fatal rat-borne disease that afflicts many farmers – a major issue, it’s time to do some rodent culling, and the dogs know it. As anyone who has terriers will know (I have a rather timid cairn terrier who turns into a frothing hunter-killer at the merest hint of a mouse or rat) these dogs are hard-wired to hate rats.
Clockwise from top left: Ivor with Meg, his adorable Patterdale pup; Stu smokes out the rats as the terriers wait; Pip makes yet another kill; three dogs fight over a big rat; Ed’s pointer Deeta gets in on the act; a rat makes a break for it in a partridge pen; Nevis parades his prize; the ferocious Dee in action.
The rat pack are a collection of countrymen who meet between October and April, when rats congregate around food sources. A collection of keepers, pest controllers and countrymen who do this for love not money, they are called in by farmers, keepers and factory owners who are suffering an infestation and range all over southern Scotland, even going as far north as Perth. They say you are never more than four metres from a rat, but in the places they go you’re often next to literally thousands of the suckers. That much was brought home to me when Moray talked about their biggest outing of the year, when their dogs caught 250 rats in one day on a dairy farm.
We start by winding our way up the glen before taking the steep track up the hillside to half a dozen release pens. As we arrive the dogs work themselves into a lather of anticipation and rush over to the numerous rat holes that surround the first pen. They know the script and soon enough there’s a loud buzz as a two-stroke strimmer is started and the hose connected to it is shoved down a rat hole. Immediately smoke starts coming out of holes all around us, and as rats make a run for it they are pounced upon by the dogs, which break their necks with one savage shake.
Mostly, though, the rats sit tight, so Moray, Ed, Stu and Ivor pick up shovels and start digging through the ice-hard earth. As soon as they break the frozen crust the dogs are in, manically digging down until there’s a yelp and a squeak and another dead rat. When they finally hit the main nest it’s ratmageddon as the terriers dive into the hole and onto their cornered quarry. The odd rat makes a run for it, sparking loud shouts from the men which alert the dogs, but none get further than a few feet. The one exception was when two rats ran up the back of our photographer Angus’s jacket, followed by two terriers, as he lay on the floor to get a better shot. He stood thereafter.
If the terriers Gwynn, Nevis, Harris, Dee, Pip and Meg are bred for this, I’m amazed at how proficient the pointer and lurcher are at dispatching the rats when they are out in the open. They don’t bother digging though and have a lower pain threshold than the terriers. ‘Those little dogs have leather faces,’ says Ivor Ward. ‘They love digging and when they get hold of a rat nothing will stop them – sometimes the rats will bite the pointer or lurcher and they’ll drop it and back away, but no matter how many times the terriers get bitten they never back away. Once they lock on it’s all over.’
One dog, however, is even more obsessed than the others. So driven is Moray’s veteran Parson Russell, Gywnn, that every time another dog kills a rat, she stalks it until she eventually succeeds in stealing the dead rodent. Often they accept that she is top dog and let her take the prize, but there’s regularly a tug-of-war which ends with the two dogs having half a rat each.
That, however, is preferable to there being no rats to fight over. ‘If that happens, you’ve got trouble,’ laughs Moray. ‘If you’ve got a bunch of terriers together and nothing to kill, then it’s only a matter of time until they start on each other.’
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The biggest day of the year came when their terriers caught 250 rats
But why, I ask Ed, don’t they simply lay poison in the holes and kill the vermin that way. ‘They’re unbelievably clever, rats,’ he says. ‘They are neophobic, which is a fear of anything new, so it takes ages before they will eat anything baited with poison, and they learn so quickly that if one rat dies from eating something new then the rest won’t touch it. In a place like this, with so many rats, it just wouldn’t work.
‘And more importantly, when raptors eat poisoned rats, the birds themselves will die. Nobody wants that.’
We work our way through the pens, and despite the icy conditions and frozen ground the final tally for the day is 84 rats, a touch better than last year’s total of 80 dead rodents. More to the point, the dogs have had a great day out.
So the shoot will lose less grain tomorrow, the dogs have had a chance to do what they were bred for, and the rat pack will have enjoyed watching their dogs working. Everyone’s happy, right? Well, no, not everyone.
‘We have had lots of grief from antis,’ says Moray. ‘Some people just don’t accept that rat numbers need to be controlled, and even if they do they always think there’s another way. Well, there isn’t.’
Not that the boys of the Tweed Valley Rat Pack are going to be put off. ‘We love our dogs, our dogs love doing this, and we’re doing something that people here have been doing for ever,’ says Moray. ‘This is a way of life for us.’