Comment by sigmoid10
5 hours ago
While cats are a certified plague on wildlife, they actually suck as pest control. [1]. Mostly because they tend to go after easier prey. And animals like rats merely get more careful about showing themselves in the open, which may have led to the erroneous belief that cats lower their population.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327915473_Temporal_...
That's about the effects of feral cat populations on large urban rats. Farm mousing cats take a little training but they do hunt differently because of it. Cats are also good pest control on small-medium boats.
A good mouser will spend hours, all day if it has to, haunting a specific spot where it knows there's an animal that doesn't have another path out. It's impressive to watch.
Anecdata but feral cats can help in the sense that the rats go elsewhere. I live in an area with a thriving rat population. There used to be a feral cat colony next door to us. In those days we almost never saw signs of rat activity, but our friends at the other end of the street were inundated with them. Construction happened, the cats were removed, and now both ends of the street have roughly the same level of activity.
Tom and Jerry's friendship makes more sense now.