Yep, although I don't think bans on outside cats are a good idea for several reasons.
The key issue is controlling feral populations in a cultural context where large-scale hunting programs would never be tolerated by the public for obvious reasons.
To do this we need to a) control the supply of fertile human-bred cats into the feral population and b) remove and neuter extant feral cats from the environment.
We can accomplish both of these goals by mandating neutering and ID chips as you suggested, and temporarily banning or placing heavy restrictions on cat breeding.
This will shift all the demand for pet cats onto rescued feral cats, which will finally provide the funding needed to put a dent in feral populations. In addition it should stop the flow of lost fertile cats into the environment.
Now, it's not necessarily doable to train a formerly feral cat to spend the rest of its life inside. My cat lived most his life in the woods, and he completely loses his mind if he's stuck inside. No amount of toys and catnip can compensate for the ability to roam freely. And it's obvious that a feral cat kills orders of magnitude more wildlife than an outside cat with a cat flap and consistent access to food.
There are also plenty of measures that can be taken like restricting outside cat ownership in areas with vulnerable animal populations, mandates for cats to wear bells etc.
> And it's obvious that a feral cat kills orders of magnitude more wildlife than an outside cat with a cat flap and consistent access to food
(Genuine question) source?
My impression from our neighbourhood is that outside cats - who also come and sit in our garden - are interested in birds because that's part of who they are, not just because they are hungry.
Tame outside cats certainly still hunt, but it's really only a hobby. Feral cats hunt for survival. N=1 here, but in about 3 years of ownership my (formerly feral) cat has killed maybe 10 house/forest mice, 2 squirrels, and 1 small bird(he presents all his prey to me, and I keep a rough count to monitor his behaviour), and most of that was before he got a flap 2 years ago. Obviously a feral cat would need to kill a lot more than that just to survive. And he's a large Norwegian forest cat living on the edge of a forest. He could go on an absolute spree if he wanted to.
I think he hunted considerably more before the flap because it was often hard to tell for me he wanted to come inside. So he'd get stuck outside for longer and get hungry/bored.
How exactly do you expect to enforce the ban on feral cats? Having giant cat killing operations? Because spay and neuter isn’t going to cut it. Even if it didn’t just result in selecting for not getting caught, there would still be 10-15 years of depredation while you wait for the die out.
First of all they said free-roaming cats, not feral cats.
You can't ban feral cats any more than you can ban rats or trees.
And you're excluding the middle too. It's not as though any policy which isn't perfectly and totally enforced is completely ineffectual. And it's also not the case that policies that don't solve a problem completely should be discarded as pointless.
In the end, to have any solution at all, you need something that a) works to some extent and b) can be agreed on by enough people to actually end up being executed.
Far too often the discussion gets completely bogged down in a where a has to be accomplished utterly and completely or we shouldn't bother at all. But the only thing that's pointless is having the discussion that way, because the world just doesn't work like that.