Reply #12: I'm an ecologist, and I disagree with your friend's assessment.... [View All]

Most urban and semi-urban environments are severely degraded by LOTS of factors. On the one hand, domestic cats are invasive species, but that's largely a management issue that argues for habitat management solutions (if people paid more attention to the reproductive habits of their pets, or discharged their responsibilities as pet owners better, the feral pet population would be much smaller and have less impact on native prey populations). Not all their prey are native species, however. Many, like european starlings, are just as invasive as the cats that prey on them.

I rescue feral cats. I feed them, turn them in for spaying or neutering when I can, then release them. Many are not truly feral at all, i.e. unsocialized with humans-- most are abandoned pets (there's that irresponsible habitat management issue again!) and in many cases they become attached to their caregivers and can often be brought back into human habitation where they can be better managed. We're doing this with a young female stray kitty at my partner's workplace right now (she's already spayed, marked, and released, but now she's becoming somewhat social and attached-- and since she's well fed, she hunts less).

Further, natural predator/prey relationships have been disrupted FAR more by human activities unrelated to pets than by all the pet cats (and strays) in the world. In many cases, cats simply replace other predators who have been extirpated. They're not direct ecological replacements because they often have different population dynamics, different foraging strategies, etc from natural predator populations but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as long as ecosystems can adapt to them. Most of the concern seems to be about song birds, but if I recall correctly cats are rarely a severe threat to songbird populations except in settings where songbirds are generally doing relatively well, and where the real threats have more to do with things like habitat loss.