Seems like the cat had gotten wind of a rat.
The English translation seems very odd indeed. It seems to combine the figurative ‘to smell a rat’ (to suspect something) with the literal ‘to smell a rat’ (to get wind of a small furry rodent). As the sentence is about a cat, the meaning would surely be literal, ie. ‘un rat’/‘le rat’. It seems an algorithm with no mastery of context produced this English translation, and not a human. Robots won’t be taking over any time soon!
It’s actually the other way around: this is a translation from the English (Seems like the cat had gotten wind of a rat. - English example sentence - Tatoeba). The same translator also made another translation: “Il semble que le chat avait entendu parler d’un rat.” What do you think of that?
Seems like the cat had gotten wind of a rat.
Hi… On reflection, why not just keep it simple? ‘Il semble que le chat avait senti le rat’? (Assuming that there is no doubt to be implied in the sentence; if doubt, subjunctive ‘ait’ to follow ‘Il semble que…’ instead).
The things is that ‘to get wind of’ is actually colloquial English (it doesn’t mean ‘to smell’, so much as to ‘suspect’, ‘infer’, ‘sense’ in a roundabout way eg. from rumors). So it’s not correct to write ‘get wind of’ in the context of a cat (which operates by literal smell), even if the original sentence has used it. The original sentence, I humbly submit, is dicey 
If you scroll down the page for that sentence, you’ll see ‘It seems like the cat smelled the mouse’ as an alt translation of the translation, which seems like a cleaner sentence overall. If it’s possible to use that alt sentence as the source instead, then this might altogether be simpler:
French
Il semble que le chat avait senti la souris.
English
It seems that the cat smelled the mouse.
Best,
Z