For people afraid of rats, a ‘rattener’ would not be a good job
Sadly, this was another job that was mainly done by kids as young as six or seven in the Victorian era. Becoming a rat catcher or “rattener” was pretty common for children and young people at that time because big cities like London or Paris were literally infested with rats.
Getting rid of rats was necessary back then because they were thought to be carriers of various diseases. To solve the problem, these kids would either poison or kill the rats with wooden sticks to eradicate them from the streets. Nowadays, we know that rats are not nearly as dangerous as people once thought.