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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The flipside of these cat bans is that people suddenly discover they have a rodent problem that they didn't realize before. Mice start appearing everywhere, invading homes, chewing on wires, boring holes into buildings, etc...

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Seems like a testable hypothesis. Neighborhoods with more outdoor pet cats should have fewer rodent problems in homes.

Humans have been testing this hypothesis for milennia. There jury is very much in.

I should be more specific that I'm talking about a modern residential neighborhood in an industrialized society.

There's a handful of programs around Chicago that involve TNRing feral cats[0] and providing them a caretaker so that they can hunt rats. You pretty much just provide the feral cat with food, water, and somewhere outside to sleep and let the cat be a cat.

[0] e.g. https://treehouseanimals.org/programs/community-cats/catsatw...

We had a cat that would regularly leave on our doorstep all types of dead bodies: birds, rats, mice, moles. Mainly mice and rates. It got to the point where we re-homed him to a farm that needed a mouser.

About two weeks after we re-homed him we noticed pest control vans outside of three of the homes on our street. We talked to the neighbors and they were now seeing mice and rats and needed to get them removed.

I wonder if there's some way of training a cat like that to avoid birds and only hunt rodents.

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