> This parasite messes with the brain, causing rats, for instance, to feel a fierce attraction to its predator, the cat.
This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research:
"Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls."
For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey
The Violinists Thumb,
Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if exposed to cat urine; it's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents, and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat
I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to cat urine.
This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research:
"Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior