ratting

ratting

1. present participle and gerund of rat

   Don't go ratting to the police about what happened.

ratting (usually uncountable, plural rattings)

1. (archaic) The blood sport of setting a dog upon rats confined in a pit to see how many he will kill in a given time.
   • 1993, Ronald H. Fritze, James Stuart Olson, Randy Roberts, Reflections on World Civilization: A Reader, volume 2, page 102:

     Henry Mayhew, the nineteenth-century chronicler of London's underworld, described the frenzied activity of one ratting contest. A terrier — the best of ratting dogs — was placed into a pit with 50 rats.

   • 2001, Colin D. Howell, Blood, Sweat and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada:

     Bear and bull baiting, dog fights, cockfighting, ratting, and other blood sports were attacked as un-Christian […]

   • 2008, Rob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain, page 257:

     The RSPCA were well aware that ratting was legally ambiguous, and when they received a report of a conviction for ratting in Hull in 1868 they doubted the legality of it.

   • 2008, Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America's Game, page 12:

     Such men usually satisfied their needs for leisure in the patronage of saloons or in such “blood” sports as cockfights or rattings.

   • 2012, Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities:

     This was the pit for dog fights, cockfights and rat killing. […] At a time when ratting was largely frowned upon by respectable people in Britain, it gained considerable support in France […]

2. (uncountable) A vocation involving the pest control of rats, typically using a working terrier.
3. Desertion of one's principles.
4. Working as a scab, against trade union policies.

• ratting cap

• (blood sport): rat-baiting

• tarting