Our house abuts a wilderness area that’s been home to a colony of feral cats that the neighborhood has cared for for years (including spaying and neutering, and finding homes for the amenable ones). A couple of months ago a new family moved in across the street, and just now they had Animal Control out to gather up the cats. These are not adoptable cats, else they’d all have been homed already.
They took out a hit on the cats, basically. Motherfuckers.
Probably not. The problem with catching feral cats is that it creates a territorial vaccum, causing feral cats from neighboring areas to just move in to the now-empty territory. Those cats were neutered, meaning they couldnt reproduce and contribute to the population, but now there’s a good chance that non-neutered cats will move in and create even more cats and just make the problem bigger.
They can still hunt and provide safety to other cats which can reproduce. Trap and release is better than nothing for sure.