The first study to document interactions between feral cats and a wild rat colony finds that contrary to popular opinion, cats are not effective predators of urban rats.
In a novel methodological approach, researchers monitored the behavior and movement of microchipped rats living in the same area as a feral cat colony. The results were definitive: the rats actively avoided the cats, adapting their movement patterns to minimize contact. Over 79 days of continuous observation, researchers recorded only two rat kills.
What the Data Shows
The study, conducted at a waste transfer station in Brooklyn by Michael Parsons and colleagues at Fordham University, used RFID chips to track individual rat movement at the site. This gave researchers a continuous record — including nighttime activity — rather than the snapshot data available from visual observation or trapping.
Key findings:
- Rats showed awareness of cat locations and systematically avoided them.
- Contact rates between cats and rats were extremely low.
- Kill rates were negligible relative to the size of the rat colony.
- Cats at the site appeared to prefer prey other than rats — consistent with cats being opportunistic hunters who avoid prey that can fight back.
The Microchip’s Role in the Study Design
Without individual animal identification and automated tracking, this study would have been impossible to conduct at the necessary scale and resolution. Observational methods require a researcher to be present, which alters animal behavior. Trapping produces intermittent snapshots of who-was-where. RFID monitoring produces a continuous, passive record across the entire observation period, day and night.
The study is a reminder that behavioral insights often depend less on the question being asked than on the quality of the data infrastructure available to answer it.
Implications
For urban rodent management, the study’s implications are straightforward: feral cat colonies are not an effective rat control strategy. For researchers, the study demonstrates the applicability of standard RFID identification technology to field-based behavioral ecology.
Source
This article summarizes published findings from Fordham University research on cat-rat interactions, conducted using RFID microchip tracking at a waste transfer facility in Brooklyn, NY.