Rat-catching, Mumbai, India

Rat catchers in fiction
A famous fictional rat-catcher was The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ratcatchers also make a major appearance in Dario Argento's The Phantom of the Opera.
Another, more recent appearance of a rat-catcher in fiction is the children's novel The Twinkie Squad by Gordon Korman. As a result of a student prank which leaves the entire school smelling like dead fish, the principal hires several "professionals" to find and remove the cause of the stench, including a sewer gas expert, an x-ray technician, and a man calling himself the "District of Columbia Ratcatcher". All three "experts" fail to find anything, with the rat-catcher concluding that there is a dead animal in the walls which can only be found and removed by means of demolition.