Public executions weren’t the only bloody form of public entertainment during the 1800s
British pubs may still be famous for their games, but we can be thankful that they’re now a lot less bloody. For while Londoners weren’t unique in Europe for deriving a great deal of pleasure from watching animals participate in blood sports, their ingenuity when it came to devising variations of condemning animals to death was really quite something.
The innocuously sounding “Dog and Duck” pub in Soho pays testament to a particularly nasty sport known as duck baiting. Pinioned so it couldn’t fly away, a duck would be released into a shallow pond where a dog would be sent to join it. Bets would be placed on how long it would take the dog to catch the duck (whose only means of prolonging the inevitable was to dive underwater). It was participant friendly too, with spectators often throwing stones in an attempt to disable the duck, and an apparent favourite of King Charles II.
Another popular sport—and one much easier to host in a pub as it didn’t require a pond—was rat baiting. Matches (if we can call them such) were widely advertised and well attended with London’s rich and poor rubbing shoulder to see how many rats their terriers, mastiffs, or bulldogs could kill within the confines of a 15 square-foot pit. During the interval, two rival dogs would be made to compete against each other and see how many vermin they could kill within an allotted time.
A terrier called Billy (or perhaps “Billy the Blind” owing to the fact he had just one eye and two teeth) was famous for killing 100 rats in five minutes and thirty seconds—which works out at a rate of one rat every three seconds or so. Billy’s (dubiously prestigious) record wasn’t to last however. Thirty years later, in 1862, a dog named Jacko beat the record by two seconds; helped in no small part, I imagine, by the simple fact he had more teeth…