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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

In any modern city there is food enough for a feral cat not need to hunt mouses. Even when they hunt birds, is more for the play aspects, the thrill, than to feed themselves.

If we want to control rats in our cities, we need to deal with the issue of rampant food waste.

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This is anectodal but I am Turkish and we have tons of cats roaming the city streets. Anyone visited Istanbul can vouch for it.

There are no rats hanging around. I am 39 years old, living in Ankara (capital city) and never once seen a rodent within the city. I don’t know if it is something else entirely but I believe cats have something to do with it.

Others appear to agree with your sentiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/istanbul/comments/10sia4d/rats_in_i...

I did some quick searches and nothing shows concretely that this is due to the high cat population, only anecdotally. Regardless, it's certainly a thing.

https://turkeynomad.com/posts/why-cats-istanbul

Maybe selective breeding can work. Create cats with high prey drive, who are stronger and fiercer and still tame.

Evolution made NYC rats big, one can do it artificially for cats.

It doesn't matter, as long as there is waste food, any hunter will go the path of least effort and energy once they figure out they can get a free meal out of a trash can.

Case in point: Bears. The dictionary definition of an Apex Predator, and yet, once they figure out that trash cans are an all you can eat buffet, it is all downhill from there.

I suspect the feral cat gene pool is constantly sabotaged by the human-directed elimination of any cat that is not soft, friendly, and cuddly.

Human-directed breeding also plays a huge role.

Feral cats will almost never beat wild rats.

Oh as a business or endeavor these cats will be sterile and used as tools. They won't be used to change the population of feral cats

You are correct. That is one more reason natural selection favors rats that eat cats over cats that eat rats in the long term.

You're trolling. But this is doable bro. We artificially select dogs for reproduction to create different phenotypes (aka breeds). Certainly we can do this for cats. Specifically breed cats that have high rat kill counts. This is similar to greyhounds where dogs are bred for pure speed.

The goal isn't to change the population of cats but to use the cats the same way we use certain dog breeds for herding.

No, I'm not trolling.

Where I live we put down cats that attack people. We onyl breed the mroe loving, least aressive cats. They will get softer, cuddlier, and less agressive over time.

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