4 ms·

You stopped reading because they said something that is widely known by disease ecologists and the result of an actual scientific study? https://www.smithsonia

You stopped reading because they said something that is widely known by disease ecologists and the result of an actual scientific study? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisingly-ineffective-keeping-urban-rat-populations-check-180970428/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisin... "Researchers led by Fordham University’s Michael Parsons spent five months observing a rat colony housed at a Brooklyn waste management facility [...] Over the course of the 79-day testing period, local cats ambushed just three of the facility’s roughly 150 rat—killing only two. [...] A potential explanation for the felines’ unexpectedly low kill rate is the size and ferocity of city rats, Tanya Loos writes for Cosmos. New York’s infamous brown rats generally weigh around 330 grams, or roughly 10 times the weight of the average mouse. Given the choice between attacking a monstrous rat, a 15-gram bird and a 30-gram mouse, cats tend to opt for the less challenging prey. [...] But cats and rats are more likely to ignore or avoid each other than engage in outright conflict, University of Florida disease ecologist Gregory Glass, who was not involved in the study, tells Chen. “Once that rat hits puberty, [it’s] way too big and nasty for the cat to deal with,” he says. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”

x86_64Ubuntu 3y ago
Yeah, I saw a TikTok and this guy was filming a cat that had lost it's tail and an eye. Apparently, it had gone toe-to-toe with the rats of Brooklyn if I remember correctly and lost. NYC rats can get pretty gnarly in size, nothing like the mice or squirrels we think of that cats usually kill.
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  Rats can get pretty large, and pretty vicious - cats can be outclassed by the bigger ones, you pretty much need a small dog like a Terrier (a "ratter") to guarantee that you can eliminate them au naturale.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  We need AI driven robocats.
exclusiv 3y ago
That study doesn't make "cats rarely attack rats" accurate. More accurately from that study - a transient group of feral cats rarely attack huge rats that are in a 150 rat colony at a waste management facility. - They watched huge urban rats that had engorged themselves at a waste management facility - A large rat colony can communicate and they had safe routes established by the time the researchers and cats visited - The feral cats had better options in and around that facility for food or fun - They observed many cats in the environment which changed the rat behavior. "a one percent increase in the number of cats on a given day made it 100 times less likely that a rat would trigger the team’s motion-sensitive cameras". So throw a ton of cats at the problem and they become less effective. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.” Many predator/prey animals will ignore each other if there is an ample food supply to share. Hyenas and lions do this. Lions don't stop eating a kill to go kill hyenas. They'll chase them off or choose to share a meal. Long time ago I used to have a huge cat that was indoor/outdoor. It went outside and killed anything that moved. It once drug home a large rabbit and put it on the doorstep. This study shows, contrary to what many would think, that you can't toss feral cats at a huge rat colony and expect them to eradicate them. True. Especially good to know if you run a waste management facility in New York. You'd probably get more kills if you used a single well-fed housecat than letting a lot of feral cats come and go into the rat colony which drastically changed their behavior and made them stay in hiding. Put a rat and cat in your house and the cat WILL attack it. Send a cat into a rat's environment, same thing. Watch a bunch of feral cats come and go into a rat colony with huge rats - yeah, probably not many attacks as they load up on the easy food from the trash bags and the rats stay hidden. Fat rats can do that. Especially at a waste management facility. The general claim that cats rarely attack rats due to that study is silly.

x86_64Ubuntu 3y ago

Yeah, I saw a TikTok and this guy was filming a cat that had lost it's tail and an eye. Apparently, it had gone toe-to-toe with the rats of Brooklyn if I remember correctly and lost. NYC rats can get pretty gnarly in size, nothing like the mice or squirrels we think of that cats usually kill.

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
Rats can get pretty large, and pretty vicious - cats can be outclassed by the bigger ones, you pretty much need a small dog like a Terrier (a "ratter") to guarantee that you can eliminate them au naturale.
_ea1k 3y ago
We need AI driven robocats.

exclusiv 3y ago

That study doesn't make "cats rarely attack rats" accurate. More accurately from that study - a transient group of feral cats rarely attack huge rats that are in a 150 rat colony at a waste management facility. - They watched huge urban rats that had engorged themselves at a waste management facility - A large rat colony can communicate and they had safe routes established by the time the researchers and cats visited - The feral cats had better options in and around that facility for food or fun - They observed many cats in the environment which changed the rat behavior. "a one percent increase in the number of cats on a given day made it 100 times less likely that a rat would trigger the team’s motion-sensitive cameras". So throw a ton of cats at the problem and they become less effective. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.” Many predator/prey animals will ignore each other if there is an ample food supply to share. Hyenas and lions do this. Lions don't stop eating a kill to go kill hyenas. They'll chase them off or choose to share a meal. Long time ago I used to have a huge cat that was indoor/outdoor. It went outside and killed anything that moved. It once drug home a large rabbit and put it on the doorstep. This study shows, contrary to what many would think, that you can't toss feral cats at a huge rat colony and expect them to eradicate them. True. Especially good to know if you run a waste management facility in New York. You'd probably get more kills if you used a single well-fed housecat than letting a lot of feral cats come and go into the rat colony which drastically changed their behavior and made them stay in hiding. Put a rat and cat in your house and the cat WILL attack it. Send a cat into a rat's environment, same thing. Watch a bunch of feral cats come and go into a rat colony with huge rats - yeah, probably not many attacks as they load up on the easy food from the trash bags and the rats stay hidden. Fat rats can do that. Especially at a waste management facility. The general claim that cats rarely attack rats due to that study is silly.