Cats may have come before us about catching big rats

As poet Ted Hughes has observed, mice can look at the odds they dare not take, but rats are another question. When caught in the eyes of a cat, a rat can stare. He may rush, seemingly calm, that a hungry predator is staring him straight.

This happened often when cats moved into a rat-infested recycling facility in Brooklyn, in the midst of Michael Parsons, an environmentalist from Fordham University (for a non-cat study). Parsons wanted to determine how some rat pheromones, like those of an alpha male, could influence the actions of animals. "We wanted to understand [the rats’] behavior based on their own perfumes, "he says. "As a behavioral ecologist, I thought," Let's get rid of cats so we can do our rat research. "

The local felines, however, had other projects. They had found a suitable place to live and would not be hunted. Deciding quickly that trying to literally catch cats might not be the best use of their time, the researchers thought that studying cats and rats together could offer considerable benefits. "At one point we just said," Wait a second, we do not know what rats will do around cats, "says Parsons. In addition, he had heard about organizations and programs such as the Mayor's Alliance for Animals, Blue Collar Cats in Washington, and Cats at Work in New York, which involve every means to fight against rodents. infestations. "That's one of the reasons I said," Let's look at what impact [the cats] to have on rats, "he says.

Parsons and his colleagues installed cameras around the Brooklyn recycling facility and installed as many rats as they could catch with unique radio frequency tags (RFID units). It was "so that we could follow each individual and his behavior," he explains. After that, and analyzing more than 300 videos of cats and rats on the floor of the recycling center, the results – released Thursday Borders in ecology and evolution"It was clear as the day:" Cats did not really bother [doing anything] when the rats were on the ground, "said Parsons. In a video, a rat walks quietly on the floor while a cat looks at him from a box a few feet away.

A video of a study conducted in a Brooklyn recycling facility shows a cat apparently ignoring one of his supposed ancestral enemies.

The researchers saw violent interactions, in which cats actively hunted rats – but this was rare. In the hundreds of videos, there were only three attacks ("all ambushes," according to Parsons) and 20 stalking events. Cats had no real effect on the rat population, says Parsons. "If you pay [to feed] five cats to control 150 rats, well, that does not happen. The rats continue to leave the colony.

A consolation prize might be that the rats seemed to behave a little more cautiously; they were about 20% more likely to move to shelter if they saw a cat. "They ran from their colony to the west colony, where the new garbage collection comes in. After the cats, they walked and sniffed, walked and sniffed," he says. "Rats have a terrible vision, so [if running toward the food] you could run directly into an ambush. But walk, you have a better chance.

A video footage from the Brooklyn Study shows a cat attacking a rodent that has been conveniently cornered.

This daring behavior may seem surprising, considering the popular history of cats as the ancestral enemy of rodents. But not to Gregory Glass, a professor at the University of Florida who has been studying the interactions between felines and rodents for decades. Glass, who did not work on the study with the Parsons team, says rats are usually too bad to make good prey for domestic cats. "Once this rat reaches puberty, they are far too big and bad for the cat," he says. "You can see a lot of cats and rats getting along with each other, lying down on each other, eating in the same garbage bag."

This means that cats are not the biggest exterminator for rats, despite their reputation – and Glass says he does not care about any initiative that uses cats to control rats. "What they do is a placebo. They make people who want to do something good feel better about themselves, "he says. "Of course, someone could have a super-cat that will take a lot of rats. But the super-cat will have to kill a lot of rats to make any difference.

However, organizations like the NYC Animal Mayor's Alliance say programs that put feral cats to work are not just about pest control – and sometimes they can be more focused on finding a sterilizable household. "Our main goal is trap, neutral, release. From time to time we can say, "Hey, I want cats to keep rats and mice." Then we try to make a connection between these people and wildcats. [already] moved, "says Kathleen O'Malley, Director of Education for the Mayor's Alliance. "We make sure the acclimation is done well, and everyone lives happily ever after." She adds that cats make sometimes feed on juvenile rats and that a colony of wild cats can have a deterrent effect on potential infestations of rats.

Some companies that have hosted wildcats on their premises – an age-old tradition – are satisfied with their new employees. "A brewery in the world used to have a cat," says Thor Cheston, co-founder of the Right Proper Brewing Company in Washington, DC, and the guardian of his own cat called Oats. "We pay a lot of money each month to an exterminator, but we think it would be good to have an extra level of security."