The best dog sports for a Rat Terrier
A purpose-bred American farm dog whose name is its job description, the Rat Terrier cleared barns and fields of vermin for a living. These are the sports that fit that instinct — starting with the one built around it — and where to try each one near you.
Why a Rat Terrier needs a job.
The Rat Terrier was bred to work a farm from sunup to sundown — hunting rats and other vermin in the barn, the field, and the burrow, often in packs. That produced a compact, tireless, sharp-witted dog with a hair-trigger prey drive and the stamina to use it all day. A Rat Terrier is smaller and more biddable than many terriers, but the engine underneath is pure working dog.
Give that drive nothing to chase and it doesn't switch off — it turns into digging, obsessive squirrel patrol, and a dog that finds its own entertainment. The good news is that the breed's core instinct maps almost perfectly onto a real sport. The picks below start with the one built around ratting and fan out into the speed and problem-solving the breed also happens to have.
Sports that fit a Rat Terrier.
Barn Hunt
The sport is the job: search a course of straw bales for a rat safely housed in a tube and call the find. No breed sits more squarely at the center of barn hunt than the Rat Terrier — it's the exact instinct the sport was designed to test, and the breed shines at it.
Happy Ratters
Organized ratting, run as a timed find on a tube-and-burrow course — the breed's literal namesake task turned into a sport. For a dog bred to clear a barn of rats, it's about as purpose-built as competition gets.
Earthdog
Following a scent into a tunnel to 'work' the caged quarry at the end plays to the go-to-ground half of the Rat Terrier's farm job. A natural fit for a small terrier bred to hunt vermin in the burrow as well as the barn.
Agility
Small, fast, and quick to read a handler, Rat Terriers are strong agility dogs — the breed already fields national-level competitors. Tight turns and course speed suit a nimble, drivey terrier, and it burns body and brain at once.
Nose Work
The same nose that finds a rat in the bales reads a target odor in boxes and corners — nose work is a lower-impact, brain-first outlet that tires a Rat Terrier on a rest day. Accessible, and the breed's scenting drive takes to it immediately.
Fast CAT
Whippet and Italian Greyhound in the breed's makeup show up on the lure line — a 100-yard flat-out sprint is a pure outlet for the chase drive, and Rat Terriers run genuinely quick for their size. A contained way to let the speed off the leash.
Trick Dog
Bright, biddable, and food-motivated, Rat Terriers pick up tricks fast — it channels a busy brain into a sequence and spends mental energy on a day off from the harder sports. More drive fits into a short session than owners expect.
Rally
A numbered course you and your dog work as a team, rally is the newcomer-friendly on-ramp that suits the breed's handler focus without the pressure of a formal obedience ring. It builds teamwork a drivey terrier can carry into every other sport.
Not sure which one fits your dog?
Take the Matchmaker quiz →Things most people don’t know.
- The Rat Terrier is a genuinely American farm breed, built in the late 1800s from a mix of Smooth Fox Terrier, Manchester Terrier, Beagle, and even Whippet and Italian Greyhound for speed — an all-purpose vermin dog, not a show project.
- As the story goes, the name is credited to Teddy Roosevelt's fondness for the type — a nice piece of breed lore, though the tidy Roosevelt origin is more legend than documented fact.
- It nearly disappeared: chemical rodenticides and the decline of the small family farm almost wiped the breed out by mid-century, and dedicated breeders revived it before the UKC recognized it in 1999 and the AKC in 2013.
Shazam! — ranked the number-one 16-inch Rat Terrier in AKC agility by Bad Dog Agility in 2024 and a 2025 AKC National Agility Championship competitor — and, for good measure, among the top-ten fastest Rat Terriers in Fast CAT at over 28 mph.
Sources & verification
The sports we recommend for the Rat Terrier — and why — are Sporting Hound's own analysis, drawn from breed clubs, sport communities, and titled dogs' records. For the breed's history and standard, we cross-check the references below. One caveat that matters: this describes the breed's typical tendencies, not any individual dog — real suitability comes down to a dog's own health, temperament, and training.
Breed references
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