Kleetus: Cats are used as a final host for a mind-altering parasite, Toxoplasma gondii
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All the ones with the parasite were seeking out the cat urine and smell.
Rixasha: I know folks who started with one cat and ended up having more cats than people in the house, made the house decor all cat-themed and got a large cat-themed tattoo. This mind-altering parasite probably affects people too.
Actually it does. Due to the similarity between humans and rodents, the parasite "thinks" that it is in the body of a rodent and completes the same part of the life-cycle that it does in a rodent body, awaiting the rodent to be eaten by a predator, preferably a Feline which will enable it to complete it's life cycle. Since humans most often are on the top off the food chain, that normally does not happen, but if a parasite carrying human is eaten by a lion or a saber-toothed tiger, then the parasite can reproduce sexually and create millions of new zygotes.
That the parasite can change the behavior in rats is widely known, but the question of whether they can do it on humans remains unclear. I would guess that due to the many differences between ourselves and rodents, the effects would not work totally the same way in humans as in rodents. On the other hand I think that it would be a bit strange if it had no effect at all. You can read about it in more details in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii I once read about a more sinister parasite that also "mistakes" humans for small prey and which was able to do things to the human brain which made it humans more prone to risk-taking and therefore prone to be eaten by a predator (at least if you are a rodent). Sometimes things didn't go as "planned" and the parasite just killed it's host because of it's intrusion into the brain.