[rufus_foreman]

>> An animal shelter in Chicago has released 1,000 feral cats throughout the city to combat a rat crisis.

...

>> While the deployed felines will sometimes kill rats, the mere presence of these repurposed alley cats is usually enough to scare off pests.

-- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/14/chicago-fera...

To a rat, a house with a cat that probably won't kill it is less attractive than a house with no cat.

[eszed]

Can confirm. We had a cat, at a shared house in San Francisco, which our landlord (mainly to be a jerk) forced us to get rid of. Rats immediately appeared, rummaging through our pantry and tearing up our clothes. I remember one cheekily glaring at me from a piece of furniture in the hallway. They were wood rats, quite fortunately, so kind of cute and not particularly disease-ridden, but absolutely a nuisance.

I dutifully collected confirmation and quotes from exterminators, and forwarded them to our landlord, along with a note saying, "look, we never saw these while the cat was here, how about you let us send back the pet deposit you forcibly refunded [yeah, he'd known about the cat all along; he'd found a loophole, and I told you he was doing it to be a jerk], and we bring him back?" He did. We did. We never saw another rat.

[zachmu]

Unless the rat is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, which makes them attracted to the smell of cat urine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodents