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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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.