A viral TikTok video of a fairground gamey inward Alaska involving a live gnawer and a whale roulette wheel has sparked a public debate almost beast welfare on the social media platform.

The picture is titled “Rat Roulette,” but its principal is really a whiteness mouse. In it, the mouse is placed inwards the middle of a spinning wheel inward a fairground stalling with 48 mouse-sized holes along its circumference.

Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire plays in the desktop as onlookers are asked to play on which golf hole the computer mouse will eventually disappear into.

The footage appears to live from the Last Frontier State Fair in Palmer, which runs until September 5. The little clipping was posted by a user named @_the_alaska_guy and has been viewed to a greater extent than a half zillion times.

“One of the highlights of the yr for us Alaskans,” writes @_the_alaska_guy, who adds laughter and shrug emojis.

TikTok Cheesed Off

But to some, it was no laughing matter.

“That mouse must be so stressed out,” ane TikToker declared.

“They don’t have got creature harshness laws in Alaska?” another asked.

“Doesn’t anyone feel sorry for the poor mouse?” wailed another.

To others, the video evoked warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for the fairgrounds of their youth.

“Grew upward with this game,” claimed 1 TikToker. “Good memories.”

A Short History of Rat Roulette

Because, apparently, Rat Roulette is non a young phenomenon. Nor has it inward the past been exclusively confined to Alaska.

The earliest source we canful find to the biz claims that it existed, albeit briefly, at Harolds Club inward Reno inwards the 1930s, although it may have got been played at fairgrounds earliest than that.

In his 1961 memoir I Want to Quit Winners, Harolds Club beginner Harold S. Smith Sr. recalls returning to Reno from a stage business stumble around 1936 to regain Rat Roulette on tender at his casino.

In his absence, his father, Raymond “Pappy” Smith, the superior general manager and the public human face of the casino, had hired “a traveler” who had introduced him to the game. Pappy and his unexampled employee were using mice they caught themselves in the casino’s attic.

But the biz in the end proved to live unprofitable for Harolds Club. That’s because gamblers figured the computer mouse would follow more likely to scamper towards a certain hollow if they clapped their custody or made a loud noise. Also, the mice would run to conform to the wind of a previous computer mouse into a hole, adding an element of predictability to the game.

Nevertheless, it turned come out to live indirectly profitable inwards the long run.

Harolds Club of a sudden had an international reputation as the gambling casino that ‘started from a mouse roulette game.’ Twenty-five years later, people allay ask to check the gritty and won’t believe it was hither only if a week,” wrote Smith.

Meanwhile, gambling-history.com has discovered references to the gamy inwards newspapers of the 1940s. These include the story of one manipulator who was prosecuted in Golden State inwards 1946 after he was found to get rigged the gamey past putting little pieces of cheese inwards the lower-paying holes.

In an initial trial, the judicature failed to reaching a determination on the legality of rat roulette. The adjudicate eventually dismissed the case when the computer mouse – a crucial slice of evidence — died of older age.