The Nine Lives of Trap-Neuter-Return in the Canary Islands

Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) is widely promoted as a humane technique for managing free-roaming cats. Yet its legitimacy remains fiercely disputed. Drawing on four months of participant observation and two years of follow-up fieldwork in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain), this article re-situates TNR as an assemblage whose coherence is always provisional. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace the translations that align heterogeneous actors, while foregrounding the relational, ethical, and affective dimensions of human-cat interactions that sustain (or undo) that alignment. Empirically, we examine how legal statutes, technical guidelines, traps, smartphone chats, ear-tipping, municipal ordinances, veterinary scalpels, feeding routines, and cats themselves operate as co-constitutive actors. Spain's 2023 Animal Welfare Law tried to fix TNR as national policy, but in Tenerife's biodiversity hotspot the statute collides with invasion biology data and local politics. Five sites reveal Callon's translation in action: legal paperwork, licensing cards that recast feeders as 'colony managers', chat-based surgery logistics, the operating room where policy meets flesh, and a fishing village stalled by a trap-savvy queen. Rather than assessing TNR's effectiveness in reducing cat populations, we highlight its emerging networks of heterogeneous more-than-human actors and the everyday, situated labor required to hold it together. In doing so, the article shifts STS debates toward the everyday practices that enact and maintain assemblages.