Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch animal shelter, we consider how shelter veterinarians shape their care for cats by reference to the desired future of adoption, while at the same time, paradoxically, the shelter's ecology itself often complicates the linear trajectory of rehoming.

Paper long abstract:

Animal shelters importantly define modes of human cohabitation with animals, particularly in urban landscapes. These institutions receive stray, unwanted or government-seized animals and aim to relocate them into human households. In this paper, drawing from the first author's ethnographic fieldwork, we consider how veterinarians working in animal shelters shape their care for animals - in particular cats - by referring to the desired future of rehoming.

The rehoming process involves human-animal interactions and practices of neutering, socialization and disease control aimed at reshaping cats' bodies and behaviour closer to a domesticated pet ideal. Focusing on so-called 'misfits' - cats posing behavioural and medical challenges -, we will show how the rehoming involves diverse ways of understanding and evaluating cats, organizing spaces, and forms of caring for individuals and collectives.

The analysis reveals how different futures influence shelter staff's reasoning and acting. For instance, potential owners' aesthetic and affective sensitivities informed how vets shaped cats' bodies. Moreover, the future loss of control that leaving the shelter implied for vets let them prioritize interventions with defined outcomes over courses of action with more open-ended futures. Finally, we highlight how paradoxically, the practicalities of the shelter's 'captive ecology' (Holmberg, 2021) itself often complicated a linear trajectory from stray to pet, requiring vets to juggle objects of care (Law, 2010) with different temporal orders.