THE CAT’S HOME: STRAY COLONIES, URBAN SPACES, and THE POLITICS OF ANIMAL BELONGING

This paper examines how urban stray cats challenge normative constructions of home, care, and legal belonging. Focusing on the Chat Libre designation in France, it explores how certain cats are granted a form of “companion-denizenship”—a legal and cultural status that offers protection without full domestication. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research and a multispecies anthropological framework, the chapter situates cats as agents in the shaping of urban space and questions the anthropocentric ideals underpinning conventional notions of home. It critically engages with concepts of bare life, and biopolitical control to show how inclusion often comes at the cost of sterilization and surveillance. Through vignettes of cats and voices of animal welfare volunteers, the chapter argues for more fluid, relational understandings of home and care that better reflect the realities of urban animal life—and suggest pathways toward more zooinclusive futures.