https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cats-are-surprisin...
"Researchers led by Fordham University’s Michael Parsons spent five months observing a rat colony housed at a Brooklyn waste management facility [...] Over the course of the 79-day testing period, local cats ambushed just three of the facility’s roughly 150 rat—killing only two.
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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.
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But cats and rats are more likely to ignore or avoid each other than engage in outright conflict, University of Florida disease ecologist Gregory Glass, who was not involved in the study, tells Chen.
“Once that rat hits puberty, [it’s] way too big and nasty for the cat to deal with,” he says. “You can watch a lot of cats and rats accommodating one another, easing by one another, eating out of the same trash bag.”