Miscellaneous domestic shorthairs, one long-hair. Varied personalities - a couple aren’t hunters, two are.
The most serious hunter (or anyway the one I THINK does most of the hunting - hard to be 100% sure when all you see is the occasional carcass in the yard) is mostly Russian Blue. (Yeah, yeah, I know, everyone who gets a grey kitten from the shelter likes to think the cat is RB. But mine really is - not purebred, but has every single RB trait except he has a white patch and his eyes are only yellowish-green.)
Also, I’ve read, though I don’t know if it is true, that the smell of cats deters rodents. If so, even a placid housecat may help limit the rat population.
I had a long haired neutered cat. He was not an outside cat and showed 0 interest in going outside. At that time we lived in an ancient teeny farmhouse. We did have the occasional rat show up. One evening I was sitting in the living room on a chair next to the couch with my pampered cat on my lap. He suddenly flew off my lap raking my thighs with his hind claws. He jumped like lightening, behind the couch, out the front of the couch from underneath, and cleared under the coffee table to the middle of the room. All of that took about 10 seconds. When I managed to jump out of the chair to see what the issue was; my cat had a rat by the back of the neck and it was freshly dead erm still twitching. I didn’t even have to fight him for it too much. He was pretty proud of himself.
The cats I have now are supposed to be indoor cats. However, they want to be outdoor cats, they are well fed, and freaquently get treats. They are playing hell on the shrew and mouse populations, and have both been seen to snatch birds out of midair. Sometimes they eat them, but they don’t need to.
Well, of course not. The rats have a near infinite supply of food and hiding places. But there’s a reason why we bothered to bring cats with us around the globe throughout history and it’s not just so we could boop their noses. Chicago has a lot of rats but it doesn’t have different rats; they’re built to the same spec as all the other rats that are about 1/10th the weight of a housecat.
In any event, having cats acts as a deterrent for rodent vermin and, even if the cat doesn’t actually feel like physically tangling with it, it’s going to alert you to the presence of rodents just through its behavior. So if you have cats, it’s a good bet you’d be well aware if you had rats in the home. Hell, even more so if rats are a novelty in your home.
There’s that, too. Domesticated cats don’t just kill to eat, they kill for the sport of killing. Which is why they’re such hell on the bird population – they don’t restrict killing to when they’re hungry, they hunt when they see something huntable around and aren’t otherwise occupied.
I wouldn’t call it sport, it’s a very strong instinct in some cats. The one unaltered cat in the house is a female calico, she doesn’t want to go outside, is a clutz, and scared of her own shadow. She’d run like hell from a mouse if she ever saw one. Though she might surprise me.
There were cockroaches in a house I rented in college, in central Illinois. Since I moved to California about 45 years ago, I have never seen a cockroach. If they’ve been living in any of my houses out here, they are much better at hiding than the Illinois roaches.
On the other hand, I am sure that there are rats in my house. There are four of them in a cage downstairs and they are “adorable”, according to my granddaughter.
Fair enough; I called it “sport” versus killing because of hunger. Not because it’s “fun” as we’d call it.
This article about cats and rats both notes that cats aren’t great at controlling rats in urban scenarios but also notes that rats are none too thrilled to be around cats.
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.
Atlas Obscura’s Taub notes that rats sensing an increasing feline presence also change their behavior, scurrying inside and largely keeping out of sight. As the researchers report in their study, 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 I will accept that cats are not normally great rat control via hunting (at least in modern urban scenarios) while also noting that they seem to help keep rats away via their mere presence. Obviously the value of that will go down a lot if your neighborhood just has a bajillion rats everywhere.
I can’t remember ever seeing a cockroach at my family’s house on Long Island. Mice in the basement where dry food is stored, yes. House centipedes and spiders, sure. Cockroaches? No never.
(In my NYC apt, yes obviously I’ve seen cockroaches and mice here.)
I’ve read similar numbers before and I don’t understand this. I’ve had 23 pet brown rats over the last 15 years and none of them have been that small. The smallest rat I’ve had weighed about 450 grams as an adult, and the largest was over 800 grams. I know that pet rats are generally larger than wild rats but that’s a big difference.
I was once taking care of a friend’s dog for a couple of weeks; a small dog which I think had some terrier ancestry. I was interested in how he’d respond to my rats. I put them all on the couch, ready to grab the dog if he tried to attack the rats. The rats were completely unconcerned, walking up to the dog, exploring and sniffing him. The dog on the other hand became increasingly nervous about the rats approaching him and finally bolted off the couch. Not what I expected.
None of the german house roaches. Single family homes in suburban/near rural areas here in CA dont have them. We do have a species of larger cockroach that lives outside in the warmer months, once in a while one gets in, but either the cats or the boric acid gets them.
We do get ants and crickets, so there is boric acid in corners, under the sinks and such. Mostly pet safe.
We do get house mice outside and in the garage. But with multiple cats we have never seen any inside, their lives would be measured in seconds. They likely smell the cats and figure, the garage is good enuf. Once in a while I put down a couple snap traps.
Yeah. Even in my ancient 1909 apartment building (9 units) we didnt get them, but apartments with cats did get mice. My neighbors wanted to borrow the cats, I gave them snap traps. (I was sorta a building super, I took care of minor stuff, and in the back stairwell, I set snap traps so they would come up from the dumpster area. )
This si why our cats are 100% indoor only, except for walks on leashes.
Hard for you to tell that. Altho feral cats prefer mice, pigeons, and leftover food, they will kill and eat an occasional rat. In Europe, when out of fear they killed all the cats, the rat population went out of control. When you have predator and prey, usually the predator do not eat all the prey, the last few prey get extra careful and the predator turns to something else, and then the prey springs back. There are interesting curves for this is one takes Population Ecology.
To an extent. Driven by extreme hunger. thirst or cold, mice will risk it. But generally- like in my home (mouse free) and my garage(some occasional mice) if the mice can do oaky where there are no cats, they wont move into dange- why should they?
In my old farmhouse, the mice get into the walls where the cats can’t get at them. Occasionally one comes out of the walls; which I find out about usually by finding the body.
If I didn’t have cats, in this house I’d have mice dancing on the kitchen table.
Mouse populations in the wild go in waves- that predator/prey dynamic I mentioned. We had such a wave this spring, and in the backyard, uned the bird feeder (the birds drop some good stuff) we could have sworn we saw the mice dancing. Well, scurrying around in the open. But then the ravens, stray cats, racoons, owls and roadrunners arrived. beep beep!
Well, Bear the fierce and evil Siamese hunts imaginary critters. They could be Rats, but he won’t tell.
He’s never been passed the rug outside the doors to the deck.
I would lay a bet he’d kill whatever he came across if he wasn’t too chicken to go outside.
He is a paradox. That cat!
On rat size. I’ve never weighed one. Not likely gonna try.
We got some sizable rats here. Occasionally Mr.Wrekker shoots them in the barn. I’ll hear ping, ping and see him toting them to the burn barrel.
He’s a great shot, but I promise you he’s not shooting mice. Not even. They’re huge rats.
Now, there is Nutria. I cannot tell the difference. I just know I’ve seen them near water, mostly.
They can be bigger than a regular cat.
It depends on where you live of course. In all my years living in Victoria (Aus) I rarely saw a cockroach, and if I did, I felt like the worst housewife in the world.
Then I moved to FNQ, where cockies are endemic, not the big fat ones, the little ‘German’ cockroaches that you can NEVER get rid of. They invade every damn part of your house, and despite getting folk in to eradicate them, putting roach bombs in every nook and cranny, by the following week they’re back again but this time with attitude. Bastards.
I’m back in Victoria now and haven’t seen a single roach. Now mozzies on the other hand…
Nutria are much bigger than the largest rats. The cite above said wild rats are 330 grams, and like I said, the largest pet rat I’ve ever had was a little over 800 g. But adult nutria are 4000 to 10,000 grams. They also have a large white spot on their muzzle that rats normally don’t have, and dark orange teeth; rats’ teeth are light yellow.
No mice or rats (thanks to plenty of felines around), and no roaches. We DO have ants, spiders, crickets, centipedes, fruit flies, and the occasional infestation of pantry moths, and one flea infestation that really sucked balls.
That I believe. I don’t believe every restaurant is infested with roaches but all restaurants get deliveries and that’s a common way for roaches to get in so I completely believe that all restaurants usually have a couple.
A professional exterminator who was also a Realtor said that all the various chemical methods simply made the survivors stronger and/or encouraged them to flee to safer quarters next door… she recommended draining the pipes and letting the house freeze - not easy for most folks to do, but very successful with a foreclosure we bought across the street - our only visit indoors was with flashlights, and we couldn’t figure out why the previous dis-owners had put up orange wallpaper with brown spots - maybe to match the shag carpet? - until we realized the spots were all moving. We left our clothes on the porch and crossed the street naked. We bought that house, and froze it for a couple months while we crowbar-renovated down to the studs - PILES of dead roaches in the wall cavities, and under the rug, and and… but not a creature was stirring, and none seen for the 20 years since… and none followed us across the street.
