Watch Empirical Brewery's Feral Cats In Adorable, Rat-Fighting Action
By Gwendolyn Purdom in Food on May 10, 2016 5:10PM
via Empirical Brewery
New York’s rats may opt for pizza, but here in Chicago the rodents seem to prefer beer—or at least the grains that make it. That’s why staffers at Empirical Brewery on the North Side have enlisted the help of a team of feral cats to keep the vermin at bay, and thanks to a video posted online by Northwestern’s Medill Reports Chicago last week, we can all witness the fierce feline rat fighters at work.
Cats have been used for pest control for centuries, it’s why they were domesticated in the first place, and in the city extermination company Orkin dubbed “the rattiest in the nation” two years in a row, the old-fashioned method is especially appealing. Rat complaints have skyrocketed this year, on pace to reach 50,000, according to a March Streets and Sanitation ordinance, and the city added 10 rodent control crews to address the issue in April. Feral cats, like those at Empirical and the more than 3,500 The Tree House Humane Society now oversees as part of its Cats at Work program, are quickly becoming a popular solution for rat and feral cat overpopulation. The cats featured in the video are so good at their work, they’re even named after the big screen hunters of a different kind of pest from “Ghostbusters.”
Of course, the kitty exterminators have their detractors—some argue too many feral cats pose a serious threat to wildlife other than rats. But as the video shows, for the brewers and cats at Empirical, at least, the arrangement seems to be working out purrfectly.