Will your two cats prevent or scare away rodents?

Answer 1

Cats will hunt and kill any rodents they find in the home. However, in my experience, rodents are not smart enough to be deterred or scared away by cats. In other words, cats are great at killing rodents, but they don't prevent rodents from entering the home in the first place, and they don't necessarily scare them away once they've entered the home, either.

My apartment building has mice, and even though I try to keep clean, I've had several mice in my apartment over the years. Usually, I just find the corpses (or what's left of them) in the morning, as the mice come out to play (and get killed) at night, when I'm asleep.

One time, however, I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and found my two cats stalking a mouse. They hadn't harmed it yet; they were just taunting it and playing with it. The poor thing was shaking so badly; it was terrified.

If it hadn't been the middle of the night, I would've taken the mouse outside and released him. But it was the middle of the night, so I picked the mouse up, put him in a shoebox, and put the shoebox out of the cats' reach, intending to release him in the morning.

When I got up in the morning, the shoebox was empty. The mouse was gone. I thought, "Oh good. He ran away on his own."

Later that night, I see one of my cats digging frantically into my sneaker. Guess what I find inside the sneaker? Yep. The mouse. Of course, it might not have been the SAME mouse, but I don't get that many mice in my apartment -- maybe one every year or two -- so it probably was the same mouse.

This time I took him outside and released him. But he obviously was not smart enough to flee a home that he KNEW had cats in it.

However, there was another time when I saw one of my cats running around with a mouse in her mouth. I thought it was one of her toy mice, but then she dropped it, and it started running! It ran behind a big, heavy bookshelf, and I never saw it again, nor did I find its remains.

So I guess that one was smart enough to flee the home? Or maybe it left for a different reason (i.e., it couldn't find any food or places to nest, so there was no reason to stay).

I don't think rodents are intelligent enough to smell a cat in the home and flee because of it. They may flee if they have an encounter with the cat, but even that is not guaranteed. The only thing that IS guaranteed is this: if the mouse remains in the home, eventually the cats will find it and kill it.