The SAZ also assist stray cat colonies in the city, making sure they are fed and watched, and receive healthcare if needed. Once these cats are used to humans, they are taken to shelters in the area from where they can be adopted. They ‘trap, neuter and return’ (TNR) the cats who are too wild to adjust to a life in a human home, and they socialise those who show interest in interacting with humans. The SAZ have been working for and with the stray cats in and around Amsterdam since 1994. The conclusion investigates what lessons we can learn from cat-human relations at the SAZ, in the context of establishing better relations with the other animals with whom we share our cities and households. In section four I move to the politics of the SAZ and the Amsterdam stray cats. The third section builds on these ideas about agency and relationality and turns the focus to interspecies care at the SAZ, and in the city of Amsterdam. Section two zooms in on agency, discussing stray cat and human volunteer agency, and interconnections between these. In the first section I discuss the work of the SAZ in more detail. I focus specifically on agency and interspecies relations. The chapter should be understood as a case study that draws on insights from political philosophy, ecofeminism and animal studies more broadly, to investigate what happens at the SAZ, and how their practices and views relate to mainstream ideas and practices. My aim in this chapter is not to provide a theory of just cat-human relations, or to develop a cat ethics for the Anthropocene. I volunteered at the SAZ for a year and his paper is based on informal conversations with other volunteers and members of staff, written statements from the website of the SAZ ( and their biannual magazine Swieber, and my observations of cat-human interactions. They emphasize cat agency, and have a non-anthropocentric view to cat-human relations, which shows us new ways of sharing the city with cats, and working towards more freedom for cats. In their practices and underlying ideals they challenge common assumptions about cat subjectivity and agency, their right to a habitat and social relations, as well as the idea that there is a strict difference between cats and humans. In this chapter I discuss the work of the Stichting Amsterdamse Zwerfkatten (Amsterdam Stray Cat Foundation, afterwards SAZ), who work with and for stray cats. Interconnected with this is the fact that the cats, as other nonhuman animals, have no formal legal or political rights. The city belongs to the humans who built it, and other animals are seen as companions, guests or pests, but, perhaps with the exception of songbirds, not as rightful inhabitants. Assumptions about these cats as either belonging or not belonging in the city, and about human duties towards them, are usually based on the view that cats, like other animals, are categorically different from humans and that humans are hierarchically above them. Most of the Amsterdam stray cats are descendants of house cats from Amsterdam, who carved out their own lives in the city, have learned to negotiate its risks, and built relationships with one another. They do not belong to a human, as domesticated animals do, but are also not understood as native to a certain area, such as for example deer or songbirds. Because they challenge dualisms between nature and culture, domesticated and wild, many humans see them as out of place, or as not really belonging in the city (Van Patter and Hovorka 2018). Still, it is often assumed that companion cats are better off than stray or feral cats, and that cats living on the streets should be rescued, neutered and adopted by humans (Srinivasan 2013). Their lives may be more dangerous than those of companion cats, yet they also experience a larger degree of freedom, understood not only as the capacity to roam freely but also to make choices about where to live and with whom, and more generally how to lead one’s life. Footnote 1 Depending on their location and the humans in that area, their living circumstances can be anywhere on a spectrum between fairly precarious and fairly comfortable. These cats are neither wild nor domesticated: they live close to humans but usually do not depend on them. Invisible to most, Amsterdam is home to many stray cats.
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