Dave
Hi,
Oh what an explosive topic! I have a cat and am a cat lover but I live in an apartment and he is neutered and never goes out. he’s my friend when I come home and I love him a lot! I can say that my cat since being born 6 years ago has had a zero impact on the local wildlife.
I think that the roots of this issue will always come back to human intervention and lack of ethics. certainly it is well known that wolf and lynx will not tolerate populations of feral cats in their territories and studies have shown that where there are apex predators there are low numbers of feral cats… Fox too will drive off cats and I once saw with my own eyes a mongoose kill and take a cat.
So it seems to me that more apex predators are needed but that wont happen until people start looking after their ecosystems.
Good article here about apex predators controlling cat populations.
https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/96/5/981/914554
Living the dream!