...well, it caught me at my grandmother's place, sadly I can't take him home with me.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Invasive outside of Africa and Eurasia yes, but housecats and African/Eurasian wildcats aren't separate species.
Considering their username ends with UK I'm going to assume they're from the UK where cats have been around longer than humans. As long as they're neutered to avoid feral colonies cats are fine outside here.
They absolutely are, I’m not really sure what you’re talking about. Domestic cat: Felis catus, European wildcat: F. silvestris, and African wildcat: F. lybica. Hybridization with pets risks their genetic diversity, outcompetition, and disease transmission: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/60354712/50652361#threats
Cats entered the UK around the same time humans did, via Doggerland during the Holocene. It should also be noted again that this is the European wildcat (specifically the Scottish wildcat subspecies), not domesticated cats, which descend from African wildcats. Domesticated cats only reached Europe a couple of thousand years ago. Their population density in comparison to wildcats and the advantage they have in access to human spaces and wild spaces means they reproduce more, which is part of why the Scottish wildcat is critically endangered.
It’s fine to have cats, it’s not fine to just invent facts about how they don’t actually harm the environment.
I haven't laughed out loud to a comment in quite a long time, thank you friend.
Now that's a theme park!
Outdoor domestic cats and wildlife: How to overrate and misinterpret field data
My kid once calculated the percentage of birds killed by cats and it was something insane like 0.0007%. Shame I can't find the calculion anymore.
That focuses on predation without examining the threat to native wildcats through hybridization, territorial competition, and disease transmission from domestic cats, which the IUCN cites as risks to wildcat species. If no outdoor cat ever killed another prey animal again, that still wouldn’t solve the threats they pose to wildcat species.
It's funny how eugenics is widely accepted to be a bad thing when applied to humans, but for some reason "genetic purity" is still lauded for plants and animals.
The real threat to wildcats comes from humanity destroying their habitat (which is why the European wildcat, once endemic to the whole of Britain, is now only found in the north of Scotland). I'd personally imagine that hybridization is preferable to genetic extinction, as far as the wildcats themselves are concerned.
Also, like I said, Scottish wildcats are no longer found in the vast majority of Britain (through no fault of the domestic cat), so unless OP is in a particularly rural area of northern Scotland it's a completely moot point either way.