Ah ok. This is a very fair point. So cats likely won't do too much harm because hawks and the like will be feasting on them lol

Don't worry about it. My last comment was a funny little saying among exterminators.

I don't count hawks eagles and owls in the ranks of small animals haha. I was talking about squirrels, rabbits, and other small rodents like mice.

Weird because every new yorker knows you don't have a rat problem until the rats are in your house.

Cats are killing machines and would likely threaten other animal populations. Every small animal is in danger when a cat is around. Cats kill for fun man lol

It just feels worse because the rats migrated when we had the lockdown and all the restaurants closed. Pre-covid, the rat pop lives in areas that had high concentrations of businesses, mainly restaurants, so they could eat the trash dumped behind the business. So you couldn't walk through back bay, the downtown area, fenway, allston, or parts of Cambridge without seeing huge rats. During the lockdown, we stayed home and as a result our trash stayed home with us. So the rats moved to our neighborhoods because that's where the food was