During The Plague of 1665 in London they culled 200,000 cats thinking that they were the root cause. It turned out that the rats were the cause and cats were their natural predator at the time. So they made things worse.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zcwssk7

The OP article does mention cats as a predator. Insignificant compared to the medieval times. Still interesting. > “Parsons et al. (56) documented less than a 1% predation rate between feral cat carnivores and rats in an urban setting.”