Pets form an important part of many people’s lives, providing meaningful companionship. However, our pets can sometimes also be a source of unwelcome pathogens and diseases, particularly if they frequently roam outdoors.
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Keep your cats indoors, one and done. They shouldn’t be allowed outside (like any pet, outdoor time can be managed under containment such as a leash or enclosure). Indoor cats live longer, don’t bring home pathogens, and don’t wreak havoc on native animal populations.
Amen
Plus, they’re cleaner and present more cuddling opportunities.
Cats only pose a threat to native animal populations in places where they are not native (or naturalised) themselves, so that doesn’t apply to the majority of the countries in the world. In fact, even in places like the Americas and Australia there is no good evidence that outdoor cats threaten local wildlife populations, except on small islands (source: Outdoor domestic cats and wildlife: How to overrate and misinterpret field data).
The UKs leading cat charity (for example) will not allow you to adopt a cat that you plan to keep indoors unless it has a health problem that prevents it from going outside, as keeping cats locked up their whole lives is deemed to be animal cruelty.
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Outdoor cats kill a lot of birds and rodents but - at least in the UK - they fill the ecological niche left empty by the wildcats, weasels, etc whose numbers have been decimated by humans destroying their habitats. Also, the prey species targeted by cats are those whose numbers are disproportionately high due to them thriving in the urban landscape (and the individuals who fall prey to cats are disproportionately elderly, injured, or otherwise compromised, meaning their predation actually increases the overall health of the population).
Seriously, read through the study I linked, dozens of sensationalist articles have been written demonising outdoor cats, but none of them take the time to actually interpret the data in a scientific way.
The cat charity I referenced was Cats Protection UK, and unless they have changed their policies in the last 2-3 years what I said about them is correct.
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I did highlight that I was mostly talking about p laces in which cats are native or naturalised, ie pretty much the entirety of Eurasia and Africa. The genetic differences between domestic cats and wildcats are essentially negligible. Please, please read the study I linked. My cats can’t currently get outside without my supervision, which is something my vet (in the UK, which has had domestic cats for around 1,000 years and wildcats for tens of thousands of years) was actually not pleased about.
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The raw numbers mean nothing though, and the extinctions are all on small islands. Again, for the last time, read the study I posted, which analyses the data about cat predation in a scientific manner. The fact that predators kill prey animals is entirely to be expected.
Domestic cats are basically identical to the African wildcat from which they are descended. Eurasian wildcats are also incredibly similar. Wildcat does not refer to any wild feline species, they are a specific species of cat from which domestic cats are descended (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat)
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Euro vs US.
Not sure about Europe but I know there are actually a lot of studies in the US that show that cats are in fact super bad for the environment here and that they decimate native populations of small ground fauna.
I would also be careful with your generalization that cats don’t cause majority problems in majority countries unless you have concrete research to back that up because I’m pretty sure if I go look up conservation groups involved with these very low populations, cats are one of the main driving factors.
The study you linked is not even a study, it’s an opinion piece by a cat behavioralist, one of the best in the country of the United Kingdom, but still a cat behavioralist. And the arguments he puts out to debunk this line of thinking are flawed and have in fact been responded to by the greater conservation community.
Here is the response: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-018-1796-y
But tldr: Cats do in fact decimate the local population of animals for a variety of reasons, Like the island effect created in wildlife areas in urban settings and the fact that it’s a human supported predator population that will not drop even when prey is made more scarce.