> 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."