I have the suspicion the amount of cats in the local ecosystem right now is lower in than it was before humans.
If you look at Natura 2000 reporting[1], the more dense and wealthier the region is, the less wild cats there are. For example, Romania which has roughly 2/3 of the territory of Germany also has twice as many F. silvestris. In the worst case, the wild cat is basically non-existent in the United Kingdom.
I've never seen a study on the matter, but I doubt there are enough feral F. catus to compensate for the loss, notwithstanding the eastern Mediterranean.
I think you seriously underestimate the proportion of domesticated animals in the overall ecosystem. Because humans have grown to numbers that are much much larger than any other mamal of comparable size (largely due to industrialised food production), numbers of our domesticated animals are also much larger than what would be sustained in a normal ecosystem.
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There was a _slight_ increase in population (and thereby cats) since Roman times...
I have the suspicion the amount of cats in the local ecosystem right now is lower in than it was before humans.
If you look at Natura 2000 reporting[1], the more dense and wealthier the region is, the less wild cats there are. For example, Romania which has roughly 2/3 of the territory of Germany also has twice as many F. silvestris. In the worst case, the wild cat is basically non-existent in the United Kingdom.
I've never seen a study on the matter, but I doubt there are enough feral F. catus to compensate for the loss, notwithstanding the eastern Mediterranean.
[1] https://nature-art17.eionet.europa.eu/article17/species/repo...
I think you seriously underestimate the proportion of domesticated animals in the overall ecosystem. Because humans have grown to numbers that are much much larger than any other mamal of comparable size (largely due to industrialised food production), numbers of our domesticated animals are also much larger than what would be sustained in a normal ecosystem.
Here is an illustration of this https://xkcd.com/1338/