Presence of humans increases the reproductive success of domesticated cats (because they get supplemental food and shelter and protection from predators), and decreases the success of non-domesticated cats (because humans are happy to kill antisocial feral cats).
Do you honestly think that some agricultural community hundreds of years ago had nothing better to do than hunt down anti-social cats? It's speculation, and sources suggest the opposite is true, the cats were were simply tolerated: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702791/#__sec6t...
Increase of reproductive success is not an evolutionary pressure and is irrelevant in the context of the comment I was replying to.
I didn't say they "hunted them down," I said they were happy to kill them.
And increase of reproductive success of a very similar population puts all kinds of evolutionary pressure on the less-advantaged population, as they compete for the same things. But more to the point, regardless of the exact words that your parent poster used, they clearly did not mean a very narrow definition of evolutionary pressure.
To be fair it is only in the last 200 years that teenage boys were not working harder than we can even imagine. Take a look at the 'workhouses' in the UK at the start of the industrial revolution. Children worked and worked hard. There was no time for frivolity. People died young and it was hard to put food on the table. If anything cats, feral or not would be happily hunted for a little extra meat.
