Note: this comes from an animal lover (and sure, I have a soft spot for cats) who finds flippant regards like "their complete eradication from the continent".
Nothing should ever be considered for eradication. The lazy solution is to eradicate. The hard solution is to "empathize" (i.e. study the 'problematic' component within a complex system) and figure out how to create a new space for it within the system/reconfigure the system around it.