I think the issue here is that we’re talking about an animal that is commonly a household pet, with a certain degree of intelligence. Disclaimer: I’m a card-carrying cat-lover who is likely to start talking in baby voices the closer she is to a resident cat, so I am massively biased.
I wonder if the problem is knowledge. I can only speak of the US here, and I know it’s very different in other areas of the world. In my neck of the woods, cats occupy this weird space where they are seen as both valued family pets by some, and farm animals by others. Layered on top of this are a lot of gross misunderstandings of cat behavior, nature, etc.
I was raised being told, when I saw a pet cat or dog kill another animal, ‘that’s just nature’. I came to never to question it, and even thought it was just a part of having a pet. Instead of seeing it as humans affecting nature, it was nature itself, as well as one with a small footprint. ‘It’s just one bird,’ was what I was always told.
This blindness might contribute to the other part, which is people just abandoning pets, not getting their pets neutered if they can, etc. The thinking is that a cat is part of nature, so letting it to fend for itself would just be fine. Same with releasing a goldfish into a pond, or an exotic snake into the swamp.
This is why I feel that culling/relocating cat populations would only work in select areas with natural borders, such as islands, or areas that have no sizeable human populations nearby. Until an area understands the impact, more cats will follow, as well as other pet populations. I also think any talk of culling as a method is also likely to divide people instead of uniting them, in the same way this question would do if someone asked the same of dogs or other beloved pets that have become invasive species in different parts of the world.
The problem is that I don’t have a good answer beyond ‘education’. I do think people’s attitudes are changing, but that’s not a good answer to ‘what can we do for the wildlife we have now’. My scope of how people think about cats is limited to my own experiences in volunteering and living in my area of the US. Also, for me to say it’s just ‘people are dumb’ feels like a nihilistic, extremely simplified approach.
The big takeaway I can offer is that the only reason I even began to strongly change how cats were handled in my own household is because of people getting the message out years ago. In turn, I try to pass on the message, but it gets difficult, especially when people mistake it as me being an extremely protective cat-lover.
