It is indeed dogs rather than cats who will go after rats.

When we were kids my brothers and I made a sport out of hunting them and some of our trophies rivaled groundhogs in size.

We had a mixed breed terrier that would hunt them down and kill them (and deliver them to the back porch as a gift) but cats generally wouldn’t mess with them.

My weapon of choice when hunting rats was a Savage over/under combo with a .410 shotgun on the bottom and a .22 long rifle on the top. The .22 was perfect for head shots when they were sitting still, but you could hit them “on the run” using #7.5 shot from the .410 if they took off.

My little brother inherited that gun when my dad passed. He’s still got it.

I’m so old I can remember when Yersinia pestis was called Pasteurella pestis— and yes, I came across references to the 1924 LA outbreak a couple years ago when I had to do some research on plague.

Tony Hillerman, better known as a detective writer whose novels feature Navajo Tribal Police as the lead detectives, wrote an article titled “We All Fall Down” about an outbreak of plague in New Mexico that killed a geologist from Massachusetts in the early 1960s; the article was republished in a collection titled The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories of the Southwest. Hillerman later used bubonic plague as the backdrop in one of his detective novels, The First Eagle, published in 1998.

I think I had some of those when I was a kid in Chicago..Never hunted rats, though.

PA+Cat, there was a severe outbreak in Los Angeles in 1924. Killed a bunch of doctors and nurses at LA County Hospital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Los_Angeles_pneumonic_plague_outbreak

There is still Y pestis in California, mostly on ground squirrels in the Sierras. There is an occasional case but fortunately, not pneumonic, which can be transmitted person to person. It was the pneumonic that killed those doctors and nurses in 1924. No antibiotics.

That Wiki article is a bit confused as bubonic produces enlarged lymph nodes.

Meh. Everyone has a phobia, I think.

My mother reacted to spiders like you do rats.

My own peeve is heights. I see peeps in movies near (much less ON!) the edge of a building and part of my brain is literally screaming “BACK AWAY!! GET BACK, DAMMITTTT!!!” 😀

There are scenes in The Matrix Resurrections and Alita: Battle Angel (you can likely guess which ones) that drive me nuts. It’s not “close your eyes”, but it’s aaaannngggg!! mentally.

I suspect I know the personal event that caused it, but not sure of it.

You and your mother are far braver than I, however.

I believe it does depend very much on the cat. Some cats seem to be much more prone towards hunting rodents and other vermin — snakes, etc… The cat my mother had was a grey tabby named “Fat Cat”, but he was bulky, not “fat”. Big cat, probably 20 lbs, all muscle — very top of the walk in the neighborhood… Smart, too. My stepfather’s friends thought their dogs could easily take him… so he would retreat under a car and wait for the dog to come sniffing. “MREEEOWRR!!” and the dog was no longer interested in him. 😀

Could not keep a collar on him… one day I’m looking at him and he’s got a collar on. I went over to look. What he had was a small grass/glass snake (?… shiny dark blue-black, about a cm thick) in his mouth, and the rest of the snake was wrapped around his neck, just like a collar…

I recall being on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach and seeing a cat that had a rodent trapped (it kept putting its paw on the little monster’s tail to stop it from running away, but kept lifting it, then pouncing on it when it attempted to flee).

Then there is THIS (warning, rat running around, so, you might not want to watch, but others will be amused)
Russian Rat vs. Cats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPK_ij0llc8
THEY don’t acquit themselves very well in the Feline-v-Rattus military field.