Do rats, mind-controlled by weird invisible brain-parasites, launch themselves to their doom in the jaws of hungry cats? This faintly Lovecraftian claim has been made, sometimes with seeming authority, and then hugely amplified by the media and by the follow-on percolation of the notion into folk-belief. With the implication that kitty, having unaccountably turned up her nose at her Chicken Chunks ConCarne and instead chewed on a smelly rat, might then pass on the brain-controlling parasite to her humans.

Turns out, it’s something of a media myth, according to the new Royal Society paper “When fiction becomes fact: exaggerating host manipulation by parasites”…

… there is no sound evidence that the behavioural changes in infected rodents increase the transmission of  T. gondii to felids [i.e. cats …] The evidence surrounding the ‘fatal feline attraction’ is inconsistent and contradictory at best (as it is for all the impacts of  T. gondii on human and non-human behaviours).

Which doesn’t mean that this is impossible, just so far un-tested in a firm manner. If such a causal transmission and chain-of-effect were eventually to be found, the paper points out, it may be far more subtle and complex than we think. Of course, everyone who has a cat knows they can do thought-control of humans (“feed me… feeed me… feeeed meee…”), and cause them to head rapidly toward the kitchen. But the lurid ‘rat parasite’ claim is of a different order. It’s no doubt been a very handy excuse for cat-haters, over the last 20 years or so, along the lines of: “Oh no, we don’t let little Timmy anywhere near cats, they could give him a mind-warping brain-parasite…”

This also rather throws cold water on the possibility that H.P. Lovecraft, through his frequent heavy-petting encounters with just about every stray cat in the unsavoury parts of Providence, Boston, and New York City, “must” have had his mind turned toward weirdness by brain-parasites.