The Recipe to Make a Rat Terrier

National Purebred Dog Day®
Rat Terrier

What happens when you blend Manchester Terriers, Whippets, Bull Terriers, Old English White Terriers, Beagles, Smooth Fox Terriers, Toy Fox Terriers, Italian Greyhounds, a few secret ingredients, and “stir well?”  You get a robust, terrific little breed that is the apple of their owners’ eye, but the bane of vermin. You get the Rat Terrier.

This “recipe” didn’t come together all at once. Starting with “fyces” (feists), nineteenth century immigrants to America crossed several English Terriers with old style Fox Terriers. The now extinct English White Terrier provided temperament, while the Black and Tan Terrier added keen senses. Bull-and-Terriers contributed tenacity and stamina.

Subsequent “cooks” tweaked the breed recipe to better suit their needs. In the Midwest, migratory black-tailed jackrabbits ate everything in their path including crops, roots and all. Adult jackrabbits could produce up to eight leverets (baby jackrabbits) every 32 days, and it didn’t take long for livelihoods to be ruined. To help control jackrabbit populations, farmers crossed Rat Terriers with Italian Greyhounds and Whippets to produce quicker dogs that could overcome a rabbit.

Iin Central and Southwest America, hunters crossed their Rat Terriers with Beagles not only to improve their hunting skills, but also to create more pack-oriented dogs.

By the 1920s, the Rat Terrier was one of the most common farm dogs in America. The breed was so popular that in the movie, “The Little Colonel,” made in 1935, an adorable Shirley Temple tucked a Rat Terrier into her bed. Check out the first minute in the clip below:

When farmers began using poison to kill rodents in the 1950s, however, the breed that had been used to do the same thing fell out of favor.
Happily, the breed has made a big comeback. Surveys and records conducted by the National Rat Terrier Association (NRTA) (which had become the largest and most influential Rat Terrier organization in existence by the 20th century) included 338,919 Rat Terriers, with more than 26,000 registered annually. In 1999, the United Kennel Club recognized the Rat Terrier, which the AKC doing the same in 2013. Over the past decade, the Rat Terrier continues to grow in popularity as more and more people come to appreciate one of the most versatile of all breeds. Rat Terriers have served as therapy and service dogs, are seen in the world of entertainment, and are even used in law enforcement and security work.
Perhap most significantly, the breed is returning to its roots as vermin control, and a greener (and more humane) alternative to pest control.  When a “Rattie” takes hold of a rat, it bites hard and at the same times shakes vigorously. Death in this manner is virtually instantaneous, unlike the alternative of a slow, lingering and painful death from poison.
As the national breed club writes, the Rat Terrier is “the dog of many breeds, an American original,” and the making of it used an “old family recipe,” that you can see it in graphic form here. 

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