re: How does society benefit from releasing feral cats back into the wild?

Yeh...cats are the problem.

Those "native small animals" aren't native to apartment complexes, bub. They're native to the forest/grassy area that used to be where the apartment or retirement living community now stands. The bulldozers that cleared that area killed WAY more useful wild animals than 5 generations of feral cats living there will kill.

I'm not an environmentalist nor do I care how many rabbits are ruthlessly 'slaughtered' a day (rabbits are a much bigger nuisance than cats, by the way, and cats keep those little effers in check). But don't sit in here talking about how cats are the problem, when in the entire time that apartment complex has sat there, cats have killed far less animals than humans killed in the 1 week it took to clear the land.

Sure, the population of ferals needs to be limited somehow since they don't have a ton of natural predators when they're in more urban communities. But you can do that effectively with TNR, plenty of studies to back that. No need to kill them (unless they're rabid or carrying disease) so a few more lizards will survive, let nature work that out.