Has anyone here seen Remy and Emile Present Your Friend the Rat?

Here's a little clip from it, which is entertaining, but doesn't talk much about domestication. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hYW5WMwt3s

That short kind of glosses over rat domestication. The brown rats are the ones that were domesticated and the short tells us domestic rats are called fancy rats because the fancy people of England owned them (I think they are called fancy rats because they're fancied rats -- rats that are liked as opposed to vermin, but whatever). Jack Black, Queen Victoria's rat catcher, is credited for being the first to breed rats for pets. But he wasn't the only rat catcher to breed rats.

There's a step in rat domestication that the short entirely skips for being a bit on the unsavory side. Even more unsavory than people keeling over from the Black Death. Rat catchers didn't just wake up and decide that vermin are worth breeding and might even make nice pets. There has to be a reason for it.

Rats were caught alive for sport, to put them in an enclosure with a terrier and bet on which terrier will kill the most, and the rat catchers would sometimes breed rats for this purpose. Not to make stronger rats, but to make a variety of colors of rats. They'd find a rat of an unusual color or marking and save it to breed more to make the rat pit more interesting. During this process they discovered that rats are clean, cleaver, entertaining animals that might make a nice pet.

Of course, the rats in Maurice would never be domesticated. They're their own rats.

As for rat kings- I don't believe in them. Rats are too clean to get their tails mucked together in blood and filth. All the rat kings that were 'found' were found dead and put on display, which tells me someone stuck a bunch of dead rats together for a bit of a profit.