No problem. And you’re right it’s never simple. If cats weren’t there, native animals would be doing the predation. We enable cats to out-compete other animals

No problem. And you’re right it’s never simple. If cats weren’t there, native animals would be doing the predation. We enable cats to out-compete other animals. Islands make it easier to measure the impact but obviously this plays out similarly in all places. We like cats, help them where we can, have devoted much of our internet bandwidth to them, and there’s no way that is a positive for other animals in the ecosystem. The level of impact is debatable but it’s not anywhere near positive. I lived in South Africa. Tons of cats in cities and very few species of birds. Go to a reserve with “proper” wildlife and there are tons of bird species and no cats. They’re utterly out-competed when the playing field is level. Going back to the article, if we feed pigeons they’ll increase in number until we get a new equilibrium. So our current state isn’t an act of god, and by doing more of the same we’ll just exacerbate the problem. Humane management is surely a better idea, like the fake eggs approach described by another commenter. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40771093)