If you have a cat and you are not living on a farm, where it can have a purpose, you are either caging an excellent predator or you are just letting it lose on your local ecosystem.
Both options seem cruel. Nothing cute about it.
Both options seem cruel. Nothing cute about it.
Exactly this; letting loose has caused them to kill billions and even extinction of entire species.
They are the ecosystem. Like it or not. Some animals are smarter than the others when it comes to acquiring space to live and hunt. Cats managed to domesticate humans and so they can enjoy habitats where otherwise they wouldn't be welcome. It's a fine example of evolution. If other animals can't adapt, it's just part of natural selection, as cruel as it is.
Lol @ western culture. In most of the world, cats are still treated little better than pests.
I mean, you're technically right, but in an evil way. Ecosystems usually evolve gradually, otherwise we're talking about extinctions.
It is what brought us and cats together in the first place: grain stores attracted small animals that could spoil the crop or otherwise spread harmful disease, cats found these populations a very useful concentrated food source but did not cause nearly as much similar trouble themselves, so letting them stay around was a good bargain for us.
wrt allendoerfer's comment: farm cats are not constrained to a small building (a house), and are a more natural part of the local ecosystem (they have generally been allowed to remain, or have craftily managed to remain, rather than having been shipped in by humans) so don't cause the same potential imbalance in local small animal populations (the ones humans find more desirable and less damaging, like birds).
Even cats will tap out then.
In the past, before much of our food was in plastic containers or more difficult to puncture packaging, or in a fridge, vermin posed more of a problem in that way within the house (they still do in poorer locations where safe food storage is more of a difficulty).
Some non-farm households even in well-off locations do still have cats with vermin control being one of the stated reasons.