All over the globe – except, presumably, Antarctica – domestic cats without owners wander the world. In which nooks and crannies, I wonder, do these cats (Felis catus) hide in my city? I feel connected to these beasts, living as they do in privileged low-density grounds not of their own choosing, possibly fed. The trade-off? Their neutering. I, on the contrary, gave birth to a daughter.

Culturally, stray animals1 often illustrate an in-between state; they simultaneously belong to the city and do not belong to it. Not easily placed into conceptual boxes, their ambiguity is potentially viewed as “unclean.”2 Without being able to definitively classify them, research on stray cats presents a vocabulary along the lines of “wildness,” or, seen from a different angle, degrees of human “socialisation.” Socialisation in cats is not a matter of solid labels but a fluid state of being, “where the different degrees of socialisation flow into each other and create many in-between areas where cats can reside.”3 According to a 2008 estimate, up to 480,000 million unowned cats worldwide slide across this domestic–stray–feral continuum.4

My background in contemporary dance has given me a profound familiarity with movement. Is straying dependent on a body? Conventional walking promotes a body with some conventional ability. Straying rests on other structures, notably some sort of connection to a system or structure that is worth straying away from. Birth families potentially present such structures, where straying away preconditions one’s sanity. From my family’s perspective, I am the error, but taking the stray’s subjectivity, I am the curious researcher and seeker. The eighth-century description of striunen, the predecessor to the German word streunen, calls it a “roaming around, sniffing, curiously or suspiciously searching for something.”5 Being active and curious contrasts with prevailing associations of straying – as erring, misplacement, and deviation.

According to Barbara Creed, who echoes a general sentiment, straying is a condition one is forced into; it is defined by a marginalised existence on the fringes of society.6 Precarity and vulnerability are prerequisites for being called a stray. The conceptual lenses of mishap and abandonment present the glaring spotlights that blind the traces of the curious and positively engaged among contemporary beings labelled strays. Being immersed in nature/culture (re)constitutions and (re)negotiations, I draw inspiration from homeless animals, and especially stray cats – for instance, their acknowledged ability to intelligently navigate their surroundings, as well as their connections to human culture. Let us approach strays and straying with curiosity instead of pity.

Creed herself strayed when she took the poignant phrase, “I stray in order to be” (p. 8), from the English translation of Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (1980), referring to it without context. In the French passage, Kristeva invokes a linguistically complex mental state of delusion: “Où je me perds pour être”7; that could be translated to “in which I lose myself in order to be” or, in the published English translation, “in which I stray in order to be,”8 In Creed’s abbreviated recitation, straying develops into a condition of existence – rather than dissolving in psychological turmoil – that may or may not lead to some existential insight. In contrast, and additionally, I propose straying as a conscious action that is neither existential nor essentialist. Straying becomes a way of bringing about encounters, of exploring new territories – and being brave and feminist in the process.

Put yourself in the city. Run after your child inside it. My experience in the city transforms when my three-year-old daughter and I go about the urban landscape. Each dog of a certain size is subject to my snappy remarks, and I lift my daughter up when I do not like the canine’s expression. I am in a constant balancing act of connecting and protecting, of providing a sense of security while at the same time instructing her in self-protection. Close to our home, an automobile in a turning lane crosses a streetcar track. Drivers check the pedestrian crossing but sometimes do not take into account the sneaky streetcar that is rapidly approaching. The almost familiar sounds of cars and streetcars colliding are uniquely piercing and cringeworthy. Street crashes contain their unique sonic notes, a sound I have not found anywhere else. It is a different sound from what I know from the movies in Dolby Surround, the unique, so far unreplicated noise of real-life car crashes – machine against machine. I want to protect my child.

Mit einer Idee schwanger gehen9 / Conceive an idea

For Kristeva the female reproductive body is abject because the transformation of pregnancy disfigures the body. But does it? Why? Did my body not do this? My body did not change all that much. I could not fathom that a baby was curled inside my belly. When she was taken out, she could have arrived from another star. I would not have known.

Someone who wrote intensely about pregnancy and motherhood is the poet Maggie Nelson. Her writing in The Argonauts (2015) pushes me to disclose my own traumas.10 To whom, I am not sure. Myself? To her? Nelsons’s prose is dense, her life full. Reading and absorbing, I feel as if I have not been present in my own life. She describes her birthing, full of nuances and details, of magic and disgust. Yes, I gave birth too, but all I really remember is how insanely uncomfortable the douche was. I am ashamed of admitting to having taken epidural anaesthesia since I was unable to endure the pain for long. It appears though that they overdosed me, since I did not feel contractions when the doctor and midwife instructed me to push. I pressed, I pushed, I used all my strength; the doctor used a vacuum that left a red wound on my daughter’s head, but still, she could not get out. A C-section followed. I was not scared, I was high. After the birth, I was dizzy from the amnesia. A nurse asked if I wanted to rest, and I said yes. I was sure that my baby would be cared for. I trusted. I was so trusting. Later, I learned that the father had not taken her into his arms. She was washed and then placed in a crib. She lay there alone, wide awake, for forty-five minutes while I rested until, finally, the midwife took me from the recovery room. Still today, I feel bad for that three-quarters of an hour I dozed away but my baby remained wide awake. I crave those lost minutes again and again.

I could blame medication. But I owe my life to medication and the pharmaceutical complex. Before medication – or rather, before the correct medication – my body assaulted me relentlessly with feelings, with emotions, with conditions that I could not handle. I wrote beautiful prose then that was dark, mysterious, and profoundly sad. After the medication kicked in, I destroyed it. Books upon books upon books – I threw those thoughts away. I am positive there were some valuable remarks amid the sad mess. Yet I was not prepared to search for them, not wanting to cross my depression’s traces.

My attention to well-nourished Viennese animals possibly exaggerates the positive aspects of straying that are enhanced by a privileged situation. Fast and dirty internet research of “stray cats” produces either images of idyllic cityscapes with cats as city pets (Istanbul) or images of suffering cats with missing limbs and eye infections (generic). The captions of the latter bulk inform about parasite infections and abject misery.

These images are employed by animal welfare organisations seeking money to support their neutering campaigns. To convince donors, these organisations aim to evoke pity and sympathy for the cause, often employing affective and emotional figures. A problematic strategy when, coincidently, their marketing strategies also frame the targeted cities and citizens as indifferent towards the strays’ suffering or even as violent. A certain type of media portrayal of, including fundraising appeals for, neutering interventions by Western welfare associations in Southeastern Europe seamlessly aligns with existing cultural prejudices in that region.11

Since stray cats cannot be socialised beyond a certain age, they are only managed by killing or neutering. Euthanasia evokes people’s resistance, so neutering is the preferred option. The practices, mostly trap-neuter-return (TNR), set up situations for contact between human society and cats. Cats are caught, neutered by vets, and returned to their original location. Body invasive as it is,12 generally, this method is considered to be the most humane form of animal management.

Management is necessary, stakeholders are assured, because a high population density of stray cats in cities results in territorial disputes, which makes the cats’ life conditions even more challenging.

In Vienna, local campaigns for neutering highlight the excessive, quasi “monstrous” reproduction of cats. The “Cat Pyramid” illustrates how a pair of unneutered cats can create 12,680 kittens over five years.13 The number is pure math since not every queen would give birth to the maximum number of kittens, and not all kittens would survive. It does, however, support the political effort effectively.

A study by the Vienna Veterinary Medicine University, commissioned by the animal welfare organisation Four Paws, attributes to sexually intact cats a higher risk of adverse health effects.14 Specifically, sexually intact female cats show elevated cortisol levels and exhibit “more agonistic behaviour in the feeding context.”15 In addition, citing other research, the study states that reproduction by stray female cats promotes infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies. With this reasoning, spayed female cats are superior to sexually intact ones. And unlike in rural areas of Austria, there is little resistance to the rigorous spay/neuter regime we see in the capital. Today, Vienna is the only city worldwide that organises and pays for cats to be neutered.

I am always amazed that the city’s neutering campaign does not address additional problems, such as parasites, zoonoses (diseases that jump from an animal to a human), or possible threats to biodiversity, but focuses solely on the cat’s sexuality.

The scale of the potential ecological harm posed by free-roaming cats became evident in 2012 when researchers at the University of Georgia used animal-borne imagery, dubbed “KittyCams,” to monitor the nocturnal activities of owned outdoor cats.16 The footage revealed that cats were much bigger predators than previously assumed. Subsequent studies worldwide utilised animal-borne imagery to determine the cats’ prey and possible ecological impact and damage. Cats are the perfect predators, it seems. The degree of danger varies according to geographic location. In areas such as New Zealand and Australia, the native fauna has not adapted to the feline predators that came with European ships. First shipped to check on other “pests” such as rodents, the cats became pests themselves. Feral cats seriously threaten Australasia’s fauna, and they have eradicated over two dozen species since their arrival there. Today, the Department of Conservation in New Zealand states that domestic cats are “one of the most significant anthropogenic threats to biodiversity.” Management measures include poisoning, trapping, and shooting.17

In Europe, the situation seems less severe. Since the European wild cat (Felis silvestris) is native, prey species had time to adapt to feline hazards.18 Many birds learn to fly and possibly escape feline predators. The problem is the concentration of cats in small urban spaces. This feline density makes them a serious danger to birds and other species.19 To indulge the cats otherwise, in play instead of the hunt, the Wiener Umweltanwaltschaft [Vienna Environmental Advocate] recommends special measures for owned outdoor cats, such as high animal protein food. Other suggestions include games simulating hunting activities, claiming that five to ten minutes of play significantly reduces the prey count.20 Saving biodiversity through play sounds like a well-desired utopian goal.

Unfortunately, playing with your cats will not significantly change anything positively for Austrian biodiversity so long as Austrians keep destroying living spaces for birds and pouring concrete over the landscape. Blaming cats for local environmental loss is a twisted human method of scapegoating.

Eva Persy, serving as the ombudswoman for Animals in Vienna, embodies a blend of relentless drive and purpose in the face of fatigue and exhaustion. Purple shadows sag under her eyes, smearing into the ashen colour of her face. Nevertheless, she embodies the beauty of someone who cares about the world around her. Most of her work in the office involves people and their interactions. These humans obviously tire her. Often, she says, humans engage with domesticated animals for purely selfish reasons and without considering the animal’s perspective. Stray cats, especially among those less connected to human society, become a space for projection. Humans might feel possessive of “their” strays and start fighting over who is allowed to feed them. But caring for a cat’s needs requires different motives than self-indulged instant gratification. An occasional can of cat food is not caring, it is complicating things.

A feeding place must be cared for on a regular basis and kept clean. Water and food need to be fresh. Cats should be fed at twilight, and any leftovers removed so as not to attract rats. If not, neighbours often complain that stray cats pollute the area. But it is not the cat’s fault; the humans neglect these feeding places.

Pauline Bruckner is a now retired security guard and private investigator. These days, she holds the title of Vienna’s premier cat catcher. She often spends her nights capturing strays, ensuring they get to the vet for neutering. One evening, Bruckner took me along on her mission: the junk-filled backyard of a former diner, scattered with half-empty food boxes. On the fence, there was a handwritten sign in capital letters, penned with a blue marker on cardboard: “Hands off.”

The elderly woman who regularly feeds the cats did not want anyone interfering with her activities. Although the stray cats reside on private property that is not hers, the elderly woman has claimed the area. The woman’s excessive feeding complicates Pauline’s task, because a well-fed cat is less likely to be enticed into a trap by food. Bruckner has experimented with various delicacies to engage a cat’s specific tastes – cooked chicken breast, liver, and tuna. She has aimed at moulding a smell too tempting to resist, a sense of promise that overrides the satiation of a full belly.

The trap Bruckner uses appears simple: a wooden board attached to a string that threads through an open car window. If a cat enters, Bruckner releases the hatch. Once secured, she covers the trap with a dark cloth. Unlike domesticated cats, I learned, feral ones tend to stay quiet inside a covered cage. While waiting in Bruckner’s well-driven and comfy car, I learned many more things about ferals and the cat catcher’s job.

Would she consider being the protagonist in a short documentary? She gave it some thought and agreed, but with a stipulation: the filming should coincide with her arrival at a recently identified, promising location. She aspired to showcase her expertise in the field, being recognised as Vienna’s very best catcher. But that night, we kept waiting. The sole unneutered cat remaining on site refused to be ensnared. As all cats do, she had magical eyes in the reflection of the streetlights.

A journalist once asked Bruckner about the difference between her past work as a private detective and her volunteer work with cats. “I have more compassion for the animals than the people,”21 Bruckner answered. I understand. While the Office of the Animal Ombudswoman deals with people on the phone, Bruckner deals with them in person. She does the field work. She communicates with various people, trying to persuade them to cooperate, asking them where the cats are and when they are fed, asking them not to feed them. She is educating these people. Most accept neutering when they understand that the cats will not die as a result but will possibly live a better, healthier life.

I feel compassion for estranged people who rely on city animals, such as pigeons and cats, to fulfil their need for connection. Fahim Amir even identifies political resistance in people who stubbornly continue to feed pigeons despite the city’s policy captured on plenty of billboards: “Feed pigeons, feed rats.” I want to see cats the way Amir understands animals in general: not as victims but as actors with their own agency in today’s late capitalist world.22 He dissects pseudo-romanticism and pseudo-nostalgia based on an imaginary past of interspecies harmonies. Animal-human relationships have always been complicated and have never been to the advantage of the animals. Even so, as Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret have shown, some species are interested in cooperating with us.23

Alexandra David-Neel (1868–1969), the Belgian-French traveller drawn to the esoteric, recounts in one of her works how she conjured a human companion in her imagination. She brought this figment to life so vividly that it became challenging to dispel the image she had crafted. I imagine a stray cat, her gaze focused sternly on my eyes. She is black, and sometimes she changes into a tabby orange. She sees me through a mossy filter – feline colour vision tends towards a greenish world. The circumference of vision and the plane of focus deviate from mine. Because of her night vision, she would recognise my exact outline at twilight and in darkness, when I could only recognise the cats’ funky eyes. We live in different worlds. Hers full of smells, mine full of thoughts and feelings I was not able to medicate or mediate away. The cat and I meet in a place I once elatedly called, quoting Haraway, a “zone of encounter,”24 adapting a positivist attitude towards interspecies encounters. Straying is a way of elegant survival.

“Cats are cool, detached, unreliable [...] cats are hard to understand, they are erratic, as women are,”25 the co-creator of the Catwoman character in Batman films says. The hypersexualised Catwoman is one of the most prevalent cultural stereotypes of cat-women. Meanwhile, the archetypical anti-sexy antagonist is the cat lady, a “spinster” who lives without husband but with at least one cat. This character builds on Western histories of female domesticity and feline companionship. Maybe if I stop travelling so much, I will adopt one and become a cat lady myself.

The cultural link between felines and femininity in the West is accentuated by the fact that variations of feline terms – such as “pussy,” “pussycat,” and “kitty” – are associated with female sexual organs. From contemporary cat figures to ancient goddesses, cats have long been emblematic of feminine qualities. In Egypt, the goddess Bastet was often depicted with a feline head atop a human female body. Further north, the goddess Freyja’s chariot was drawn by cats. The Greek goddess Artemis, later known as the Roman Diana, was also connected with cats. However, cats’ stature drastically declined in the Middle Ages. Christianity’s and monotheism’s suspicion of the female form and its associations cast a shadow on cats, branding them companions of Satan. This demonisation led to horrific acts, like the burning of cats.

I learned from a Netflix documentary that a cat’s purr matches the frequencies of crying babies.26 A possible reason why humans feel drawn to cats.

By following animals and moving through built up areas, I become a part-time flâneuse. The term “flâneur” unlocks the floodgates to historiographies of wandering male writers and philosophers, all relying on the privileged male position. Flâneurs were subjects observing the city. “Women,” to name and reproduce flawed binarities, were objectified. The herstories of female city experiences differ radically from those of Western white males. At the beginning of the twentieth century, lingering women were suspected of being prostitutes. Recent research on female flânerie has revealed intriguing figures when compared to male flânerie.27 But, “if female flâneuring is the focus,” theorist Maren Lickhart ponders, “it’s questionable whether it needs the foil of the male flâneur.”28 According to this logic, the historiographies of the female flâneuse do not share the history of the prototype flâneurs, such as Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Balzac.

For these men, wandering and getting lost and immersed is a conscious choice. They do not go where they do not want to go. There is no necessity but their curiosity, no bodily hunger but that of their mind. Similarly, in the dérive (drift), a psychogeographical technique popularized by Situationist Guy Debord, ambulating is encouraged.29 Here, movement brings you out of an “ordinary” frame of mind. Straying, in contrast, is ordinary. It is movement without choice.

A stray does not choose to stray – with the exception of those domestic cats that decide not to return “home.”

I am wary of comparing human experiences of homelessness, of being a refugee and such, to stray animals. Human experience on the fringes of human society differs fundamentally from the animal experience on the fringes of human society. For a human being, losing a home results in the loss of access to basic care systems, jobs, and the social net. Homelessness is potentially more traumatic than the loss of a human roof to an animal. We assume domesticity for domesticated pets as a given, but our homes are not their innate homes.

After Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a flood of images emerged that showed Ukrainian refugees with their pets in tow. Instead of producing images of masses of migrants, as in other wars, the European media outlets told individualised stories. Showing people and their kindness towards animals made these people even more human and worthy of the spectator’s compassion. But, as with all war images, these images had been curated. For example, according to one article, Ukraine’s media portrayal of people with their dogs may have been based on the Soviet narrative of the dog as a trusted companion.30 No image is safe from being tampered with by social narratives.

I feel protective of stray thoughts. I want to collect them and bind them into a beautiful floral bouquet that I hang on my door. So, before you enter me, you see them. To engage with you, I would need to invent you. There is no one in the vicinity of my vagina, my pussy. I write pussy as a reference to and reverence for the feminist musical group Pussy Riot. There is hope. It is hopeful to see that some species can survive in a world that humans strive to destroy. I do not feel naked in the eyes of the cat31 I just invented. I do not think she is very interested.

A cinematic tableau depicting a street café in Paris. In Le Bonheur (France, 1965), director Agnes Varda shows the protagonists talking at a table, but the camera does not stay with the characters. It strays instead, the visual focus shifting to the extras in the background. The actors are still performing at their table but are not visible to the audience. While in general, all cinematic elements serve the narrative, including characters, set design, framing, and lighting, the movements of the stray camera produce visual suspense and friction within the storyline. I like Varda’s conscious drifting, but whenever I met my friend Greta in a café, her gaze always drifted somewhere else. I was disturbed by this, and politely asked what she was looking at. She said, “I am a filmmaker. I like to observe people.” Indeed, I thought, but not those in front of you.

Use words that are already plump and healthy, no time to ripen extravagant words. I am scared that you will miss all the excellent words I found for you in the dictionary. I wanted to create a streamlined article. With every paragraph in proper order, in precise words. I imagined my essay as an intellectual highway, straight to the point. The complete contrast of stray movements, fighting the concept’s arbitrariness and caprice.

During the preventive quarantine at the beginning of the pandemic, while shopping for groceries, you received an official message on your phone. This message mandated you to return to your flat.

We stray on different planes. Longing is possibly a feeling that leads me astray. Without longing, I would stay put, concentrate on my life. Encouraged to stay close to home, the short radius of the immediate neighbourhood was enhanced in meaning. Freedom of movement became precious, and my surroundings were experienced more deeply. Because we were so stuck inside it, some quarantine experiences made the radius shrink to one’s indoors. I learned then that it is possible to stray inside. Sex is possible outside and inside, and so is straying.

Architect and city planner Le Corbusier lamented that “the old cities” were built along animal trails, resulting in a messy structure.32 The animals created paths by meandering and zig-zagging to find food and water, and people built their houses and dwellings along these animal routes. The modern and, most importantly, hygienic city, in contrast, cuts that meandering and creates the sane, straight line. Today, we know that straight-lined cities get very dirty as well. Roaming animals mark and create territories by expelling their bodily fluids. Humans mark territories by littering. 33 And although human senses cannot perceive the odorous spraying of the cats’ territories, I can speculate about their habitats. I wonder about the cat’s paths in the city – the mapping of the imagined cat ways becomes a post-humanist drawing.

I stray outdoors – houses, rivers, woods, and power plants. I stray indoors – schools, prisons, and libraries. Ladders allow the exploration of different levels of the bookshelves. The upper shelves are not reachable from the floor, and I remember that straying does not happen on a horizontal plane alone. Straying includes jumping, sliding, and traversing all dimensions in the three-dimensional world, whereas walking keeps you on one plane. Discipline is choreography. Straying is improvisation. Archiving and cataloguing build methodical structures. Meandering and lingering generate unique patterns. Messy modes of movement enable the discovery of unexpected and enchanted encounters.

Straying is not associative because the body must always traverse the space without skipping space. There are no cosmic wormholes that gobble up bodies and spit them out again at another place. Thoughts can jump in the time-space continuum, but bodies are bound to another dimension. The cat jumps and moves through the air and lands softly. Do cats always land on their feet? Whereas art is often about cutting out the unnecessary, walking does not pose the question of what is an accessory and what is essential.

Straying involves all one’s senses. There is a scent in the air. I smell a vanilla-y body product I used in my teens. I am transported via a time-machined inner feeling mediated by permeable skin.

English etymology provides another angle: to stray is akin to street and extravagant. A definition of “stray” on the Merriam-Webster site is unwanted. Examples given of the unwanted: stray light. You have no idea, dear Merriam-Webster, how beautiful stray light fluctuates through optics. Astronomers observing distant galaxies are not fond of stray light diffusions in their telescopes. But broken in camera lenses, stray lights enchant the cinematic image, created in postproduction or with special, possibly old lenses diffracting the light resourcefully. Diffraction is today’s antidote to humanist self-reflection.34 Stray light is beautiful, enhancing dreamy sets and scenery, a love scene, heroine kisses hero. I see a never-written love story. I aim to diffract myself, but I am already distracted.

I imagine myself scattering in front of you. I plop my liver at your feet, and my heart pumps on the floor. Your heart, in contrast, resembles the lead singer in Green Day’s music video Stray Heart. And I love that heart. It is the perfect stray object. A cunning, smoking heart leaves the breast that holds it in place; he runs and has fun. The guy, the lead singer, stands at the door of a beautiful woman he is in love with. She looks at his heart and knows he is not truthful. Because she stares into his chest, and there is a hole – no heart. The hole is beautifully rendered, a perfect vantage point for other perspectives. She sees right through his chest to what is behind, perspectives his body no longer conceals. The heart is cunning. This is a smoking, definitively male figure who is having fun on his adventure while his owner looks miserable. I strive for this kind of stray. Free. Absolutely free to have fun. I love your free heart. This is your beautiful, capable heart. Mine is fleshy, somewhere on the floor.

Cats delight in meat.

1 The grouping of “animals” and “humans” as broad categories

is deeply flawed, because neither all animals nor all humans are equal. Lacking an adequate and easy-to-read alternative, I continue the flawed generalizations here.

2 Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1997), 60.

3 Alley Cat Allies, “The Cat Socialization Continuum: A Guide to Interactions Between Cats and Humans,” 2020, https://www.alleycat.org/resources/cat-socialization-continuum-guide.

4 CAROCat, “Statistics on Cats,” accessed May 17, 2022, https://carocat.eu/statistics-on-cats-and-dogs.

5 DWDS, Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, “Streunen,” accessed March 15, 2022, https://www.dwds.de/wb/streunen.

6 Barbara Creed, Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (Sidney: Power Publications 2017).

7 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Édition du Seuil 1980), 19.

8 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1982), 12.

9 Translated literally, “Go get pregnant with ideas.”

10 Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015). Maggie Nelson is an American poet and writer; The Argonauts is described as a prime example of autotheory by Lauren Fournier in her book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022).

11 In Romania, often described by media as a stray dog dystopia, the misery derives directly from Nicolae Ceausescu’s housing schemes, whereby people were relocated to small flats without any extra space, and, with the growing cost of dog food, many people let their pets go.

12 Eva Meijer, “Stray Agency and Interspecies Care: The Amsterdam Stray Cats and Their Humans,” in Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene, edited by Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz (2021), 293, http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63523-7.

13 Tierschutzombudsstelle Wien [Animal Protection Ombudsman Office Vienna], “Das Streunerkatzenprojekt der Stadt Wien,” March 2022, https://www.tieranwalt.at/fxdata/tieranwalt/prod/media/TOW_Streunerkatzenprojekt-Wien.pdf.

14 Elisabeth M. Gilhofer et al., “Welfare of Feral Cats and Potential Influencing Factors,” Journal of Veterinary Behavior 30 (2019): 119, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2018.12.012.

15 Gilhofer et al., 121.

16 Sonia M. Hernandez et al., “The Use of Point-of-View Cameras (Kittycams) to Quantify Predation by Colony Cats (Felis catus) on Wildlife,” Wildlife Research 45 (2018): 357, https://doi.org/10.1071/WR17155.

17 Department of Conservation, NZ, “Feral cats,” accessed May 13, 2022, https://www.doc.govt.nz/about-us/our-role/our-purpose-and-outcomes.

18 Georg Ehring and Lars Lachmann, “NABU: In Deutschland stirbt keine Vogelart wegen Katzen aus,” Deutschlandfunk, February 7, 2013, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/nabu-in-deutschland-stirbt-keine-vogelart-wegen-katzen-aus-100.html.

19 Wiener Umwelt Anwaltschaft [Vienna Environmental Advocacy], “Hauskatze auf der Jagd: Empfehlungen zum Schutz der Wildtiere,” 2018, https://wua-wien.at/tierschutz/amphibien2/2288-hauskatze-auf-der-jagd-empehlungen.

20 Martina Cecchetti et al., “Provision of High Meat Content Food and Object Play Reduce Predation of Wild Animals by Domestic Cats Felis catus,” Current Biology 31 (2021): 1107–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.12.044.

21 Karin Cerny, “Wo die wilden Katzen wohnen,” Der Standard, March 10, 2021, https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000124801937/wo-die-wilden-katzen-wohnen.

22 Fahim Amir, Schwein und Zeit: Tiere, Politik, Revolte (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2018), 16.

23 Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, Karin Harrasser, Katrin Solhdju, “Stay Where the Trouble Is”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 3(4), 2011: 92–102, https://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/2532.

24 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 218.

25 Akanksha Singh, “The Ancient Roots of Catwoman,” BBC, February 28, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220225-the-batman-the-ancient-roots-of-catwoman.

26 Andy Mitchell, dir., Inside the Mind of a Cat (documentary, Netflix, 2022), 67 min.

27 Georgiana Banita, “Hochprozentig weiblich: Flanerie und Alkohol,” in Die Lust zu Gehen: Weibliche Flanerie in Literatur und Film, eds. Georgiana Banita, Judith Ellenbürger, and Jörn Glasenapp (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 42. For an introduction to female flânerie, see Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), ebook.

28 Maren Lickhart, “Weibliche Strassenerfahrungen bei Irmgard Keun und Klaus Mann: Entgrenzung und Ekstase in der Großstadt,” in Die Lust zu Gehen: Weibliche Flanerie in Literatur und Film, eds. Georgiana Banita, Judith Ellenbürger, and Jörn Glasenapp (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 15–40 (my translation).

29 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” [1956], Situationist

International Online, accessed May 25, 2022, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html

30 Matthias Dusini, “Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?”, Falter 15 (12 April 2022), https://www.falter.at/zeitung/20220412/hunde-wollt-ihr-ewig-leben. There was also a mention of Laika, the first animal in space. As a former stray, Laika became the center of an influential Soviet propaganda narrative.

31 In his essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) (2008),” Jacques Derrida discusses instances of standing naked before his cat, which makes him feel embarrassed. He attributes this discomfort to an anthropocentric worldview that holds that only humans can experience or trigger shame. Derrida argues against this perspective, claiming it undermines the complexity of animal experiences and unfairly degrades them as less than human subjectivity. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1-51.

32 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (Paris: Les Editions G. Crès & Cie, 1925; New York: Dover Publications, 2013 [1929]); Catherine Ingraham, “The Burdens of Linearity: Donkey Urbanism,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 642–57.

33 Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford University Press, 2010).

34 As a tool of thinking, diffraction was introduced by Donna Haraway and later adopted by Karen Barad. Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart”, Parallax 20(3): 168–187, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623.