I don’t like them gatosI will not deceive you.
It is not for anything rational or tangible. Simply, we do not have a good feeling between us. Where others see adorable beings, I only see a healthy and prudent mistrust. However, for a few weeks, life has been trying to change his mind. I don’t know if it’s true that nature takes advantage of the withdrawal of humans to recover lost spaces, but the truth is that strange things happen in my garage.
And by “rare” I mean “wheel“. This has meant that every time my attempts to try to hunt them failed, the theme of the cat returned recurrently at lunch, dinner and breakfast. After all, “What better than a cat to get us out of this mess?” They tried to sell me in one way or another without me having an answer for it.
Thank goodness the internet did have it and I stumbled upon it by accident: cats’ best kept secret is that they are “embarrassingly ineffective” at catching rats. Checkmate, Garfield
“Make it look like an accident”
In 2018, Michael Parsons and his team at Fordham University decided to observe a colony of rats living in a Brooklyn dump for five months. At first, his idea was to study the role that pheromones played in the behavior of animals. However, they quickly realized that the interesting thing was in the interactions between cats and rodents.
Mert Guller
The researchers installed cameras throughout the enclosure and collected more than 300 videos of active animals. Well, during the 79 days that the experiment lasted, the cats in the area tried about 20 times to ambush the landfill rats, but they only succeeded with three of the 150 that made up the colony. But maybe that’s not the worst: they only managed to kill two of themthe other got away scot-free.
These conclusions are surprising because, when we talk about cats, we must not forget that they are one of the “most ubiquitous and environmentally damaging invasive predators on Earth” and I’m not saying it, it’s a 2017 study that found compelling evidence that cats had contributed to the extinction of at least 63 vertebrate species. Needless to say, rats were not among them.
However, I don’t want my anti-cat bias to lead me to ignore important facts: like the rats in New York have a well-deserved reputation for being gigantic and very aggressive. Tanya Loos recounted that, on average, a New York rat weighs ten times more than an average mouse and that it was very possible that this invited cats to look for easier and more affordable prey.
This may be true, of course. So much so that, in fact, nothing leads us to believe that cats and rats conflict on a regular basis. Most likely, taking into account the data that specialists in animal behavior are providing, it is that they ignore each other. Something that would explain the cat’s ineffectiveness, but would also remove them from the list of “natural weapons” to fight against rats. Quid pro quo.
In Xataka | The science behind petting your cat correctly
Image | Roberto Huczek
