I don’t like cats. My wife and three daughters love cats. Since I am the leader in this house, we are officially a cat household. I have, however, drawn the line at two cats, and I am probably the only thing standing between my family becoming social recluses with a house full of 300 cats.

In the debate between dogs and cats, it is not even close. A dog is forever loyal. If you fall, it will run over to the neighbors and bring them back to assist you. If the neighbors are not home, a dog will literally dial 911 and have the ambulance pick up your favorite pizza on the way to you. If you have a dog in your house or on your farm, you don’t even need Life Alert. As a caveat, if your dog weighs less than 10 pounds, the above scenario does not apply. If you have a dog under 10 pounds, you do not have a dog, you have a cat.

If you had the unfortunate experience of falling as a cat owner, I have some terrible news. Your cat would swat you in the head every 10 minutes because it wanted food. After sensing its newfound freedom of being owner-free, it would take the opportunity to poop and pee all over the furniture. After about three days, the cat would resort to eating you.

For all my disdain for our furry feline friends, there is one area where cats are incredibly useful, and that is on the farm. There is no better solution to a burgeoning mouse and rat population than becoming the local drop-off point for every snaggletoothed, one-eyed, bad-attitude furry feline in the neighborhood. Cats are the SEAL Team Six of the hunter-gatherer world and will stealthily whittle away every rodent on a farm.

We have a personal experience with this in the Faber house as we are surrounded by corn fields, and every fall, we would have an army of country mice make their way into our abode. There is nothing quite like shuffling to the bathroom at 2 a.m. with an aging prostate and nearly stepping on a mouse eating the remnants of last night’s food bits on the floor.

The final straw in the Faber house was after it became apparent that Mr. Faber’s farm truck was carrying rats from the farm back to the house in the warm engine. This mode of transportation was not adequate, as the rats found out that the family minivan provided all the amenities and bougie accommodations that a farm rat was not typically accustomed to. The minivan had warm spots by the engine and a treasure trove of discarded Cheerios and french fries from a couple young children who valued throwing things more than daily sustenance.

This invasion came to a head one fateful day when Mrs. Faber needed to get something out of the glove box. It was in this moment that she came face to face with the largest mass murderer in human history: the common rat, who was responsible for the decimation of an estimated 200 million Europeans in the Black Plague. The scream that emitted from her is still reverberating through the mountains of eastern Serbia.

I remember this day clearly. It was Feb. 12, 2015 at 3 p.m. when Mrs. Faber sat me down and said we either needed to become a cat household or a rat household, and if I chose the latter, it wouldn’t involve Mrs. Faber. After this subtle ultimatum, I caved and we became a house with two outdoor/indoor cats.

While this was a longer-term solution, I was still tasked with dealing with our current invasion. After a brief thought of just burning the minivan and claiming the insurance money, I decided on a more proactive approach. At that point, we had rats running through the heating ducts of the house and in the van, so I strategically placed sticky pads in the heating ducts and all throughout the minivan with a few bait Cheerios. Rats apparently are fairly concerned about fiber intake and heart health, as I was able to successfully pull a handful of forlorn rats on sticky pads out of the van. With all my success in the van rat extermination program, we quit seeing rats or hearing them run through the heating vents.

There are a few sayings about assuming, and I was assuming that all the rats had been eliminated, until we started noticing a putrid smell in the house. A putrid smell that seemed to correlate with turning on the heat in the house. Yes reader, you remembered the sticky trap in the heating duct before I did. After opening the register, I found a ballooned-up rat in the later stages of decomposition. It was in this moment I realized Mrs. Faber was going to have to keep me around a little longer, because discarding stinky rats from a heating duct was something Mrs. Faber would not do.

As our cats reached maturity, we quit seeing mice or rats, and in the end, Mrs. Faber was probably right.