In her article “Grinding the Souls: Politics of Interspecies Pity and the Labor of Care in a South Korean Animal Shelter,” EuyRyung Jun explores the gendered dynamics of care in taking care of shelter dogs in South Korea. Animal rights groups in South Korea have been portraying shelter animals as the “most vulnerable” in society. In her article, Jun points out that such a maneuver can occlude the inequality and differences between humans. In this article, Jun focuses on gender and class based differences that shape the volunteers' experiences at the shelter. However, Jun also writes about the “enchantment” of care that brings the shelter dogs and volunteers together. In this interview, Jun reflects on her research trajectory, her fieldwork experience, and the analytical and political implications of her research. 

Hae-Seo Kim: What I find especially insightful about your article is how you capture your interlocutors’ passion for helping the dogs, and your ability to analyze their motivations and relationships to the dogs without subsuming them under the analytic of “feminized labor” or “gendered labor exploitation.” What questions did you have when you first started fieldwork, and how did your research questions evolve?

EuyRyung Jun: Before I started my longer-term fieldwork at ARA [Animal Rescue in Action], I had conducted preliminary interviews not only with its staff members but also with veterinarians [vets] who were commissioned by local city governments to take care of rescued dogs and put un-homed ones to death. I was especially intrigued to find out how individuals were dealing with the dogs that were left un-homed after the official ten-day period and came to know that many vets waited for more than ten days to find homes for the dogs as long as they had space to keep them. This situation as well as ARA’s interventions to stop killing seemed to put into question the validity of utilitarian ethics behind the concept of animal welfare.

I initially interpreted individual vets and ARA in terms of the concept “response-ability” (Haraway 2016, 78) as their actions seemed to arise amidst interspecies vulnerabilities between them and the dogs that had been rendered “killable.” However, compared to the vets who were responding at the level of individual relationships with dogs, ARA’s act seemed to pose many more questions as it involved more organized commitments. That is, what and/or who came to constitute this particular “response-ability” and in what circumstances was it being sustained? To address these questions, it became important to examine more than inter-species compassion and vulnerability (Dave 2014) and instead interrogate the “social” worlds in which this form of interventions became possible.

After starting my fieldwork at ARA, I immediately found out that ARA’s activities were predominantly made up by the “very hard” labor of women of lower to middle income backgrounds, which can be termed as “gendered labor exploitation.” On the other hand, while that aspect alone had much to be said especially in its relationship to the country’s rapidly growing field of animal rights, I felt that I could not simply reduce women’s engagements into exploitation. If “gendered exploitation” could be the name that explained their relationship to the wider field of animal rights/welfare, it did not seem to explain every aspects of their relationship with the dogs and other women at ARA. This then made me ask what really led them to work and stay at ARA despite the intensity of the labor involved and the alleged disapproval of their own family.

HK: Could you tell us how you came to do research on animals and animal rights in South Korea? I also learned a lot from your previous article on caring for “street cats” (Jun 2017). What made you interested in anthropology of animals and animal rights in South Korea?

EJ: I first became interested in animal issues after my family adopted a cat in 2006. We brought a four-month-old cat right after my grandma had passed away, as a way of dealing with the sudden loss. Similar to the women at ARA, for many coming to ARA was deeply related to the experience of losing their own pets. In South Korea, the early to mid-2000s was also the time around when both the culture/industry of companion animals and the field of animal rights and animal welfare began growing rapidly. Having a cat (pet) for the first time gave me a first-hand opportunity to see a whole new world of animal-human relation, while the rapid changes in animal related issues in the country gave me lots to think about.

The issue of “street cats” became my first research topic, which then developed into the article (Jun 2017) you mentioned. To me, it was where the change appeared to be most evident. In traditional times, cats were believed to be mystical creatures that could harm humans. Even in the 1990s, not only cats were thought to be unsuitable to be companion animals, but also street cats, that were called by the name of “thief cats,” were considered to be pests, completely disposable. Street cats were called thief cats because they roamed around in urban neighborhoods searching for food wastes.

However, since the 2000s, with the rise of cats as popular companion animal, people who fed and took care of street cats and thus were called as “cat mom/daddy” began appearing, while the city government of Seoul declared that it was its duty to take care of the welfare of street cat population, thus launching its first TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return) program. And, although there is no separate activism, existing either for cats or for dogs, their welfare tends to be taken care of differently. That is, if street cats go under TNR programs in most regions in South Korea, dogs that become strays go through the ten day online notice program and, with no home to go, become euthanized, thus generating various interventions such as that of ARA.

HK: How are animals painted as the “most vulnerable” in South Korean society? What are the political consequences of this?

EJ:  I would like to share an anecdote that may illustrate how that works. A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk at the monthly gathering of the “comparative animal law study group,” which was comprised of legal professionals and graduate students of law, interested in animal rights in South Korea. Before the day of my talk, I had the chance to have a cup of coffee with the group’s representative, a middle-aged man in his fifties, who introduced himself as a small business owner and also as a graduate student writing a thesis on animal law. He told me about how he, as one of the “386 generation” (a name for the generation of people who were born in the 1960s, went to college in the 1980s and thus experienced the militant student activism under the authoritarian regimes of the time), became interested in this issue of animal rights. He had been searching for a way to continue the spirit of the social movement he had been involved in in the 1980s as a college student and reached the conclusion that animals are the last group whose mode of existence has not improved much yet. In saying this, he redefined the area of animal rights in continuity with the legacy of social and human rights activism that ensued under the authoritarian regimes before the 1990s. Although he was not so representative of those working in the country’s burgeoning field of animal protection and rights—this field has visibly become occupied by many more women than men—his story still largely reflected the changing political and moral status of animals, within which animals have been increasingly defined as the “most vulnerable.” But, at the same time, it also seem to reveal the political implications of this kind of imagination. The idea of animals as the most vulnerable and/or as the last population whose situation has not been much improved tends to eclipse the fact that there are still many problems within the human population, e.g., exploitation and inequalities. Or, the situation where much more donations than anywhere else have been pouring into the field of animal rights in recent years is not only striking in itself, especially given the relatively short history of animal rights activism, but also may reveal the post-political atmosphere prevalent in the country in general.

HK: You discuss “interspecies politics of pity” in this article in relation to migrant workers in South Korea, and how those in the most precarious social positions such as migrant workers, are the ones tasked with gory work such as butchering animals and are stigmatized for it. You also discuss it in relationship to the women workers and the “grace” asked of them in relation to working with vulnerable animals, disregarding the gendered exploitation of labor and feminization of care labor. Can you explain a bit more about how the politics of interspecies pity emerge in South Korea, and how it depends on, in your words, “ignorance of human difference and inequality?”

EJ: Maybe, what has been going on recently with KARA [Korea Animal Rights Advocates], one of the largest animal rights groups in the country that received 65 billion won for donation last year, might indirectly address this question. In January this year, a group of staff members accused KARA for labor exploitation and the repression of the newly organized labor union. They claimed that about forty people left the group, which usually has less than seventy staff members, in the last three years and denounced the group’s long-term labor exploitation that relies on extremely short-term labor contracts. To me, this incident vividly shows how the field of animal rights/welfare in South Korea, that rapidly grew in the last twenty years, has seriously neglected the problem of human labor and its gendered aspects. The fact that one of the largest animal rights groups that draws a lot of donations has been run based on the exploitation of devoted and flexible female labor reveals the deep irony embedded in the field. I mean, yes, taking cheap, flexible labor for granted is a general social phenomenon in our neoliberal times, but, in the field of animal rights, it is not only neoliberal but also has to do with this tendency of erasing human difference vis-à-vis “animal suffering.” Even the idea of speciesism, conceptualized by Peter Singer, defines itself more profound than racism and/or sexism. When humans appear “an accomplice and a beneficiary in a society of egalitarian power sharing” (Song 2009, 54), the neglect on human difference can be more easily justified.

HK: And drawing on this question, what is the significance of your intervention for thinking about the politics of animal rights and animal welfare in South Korea?

EJ: I think that there is certain interrelated-ness between the deepening of neoliberal sociality and the rapid rise of animal rights and animal welfare in South Korea in the last two decades. Or, the former might be one of the social contexts in which the latter could arise and flourish. Although I did not directly discuss the neoliberal part in my article, I still sought to situate the politics of animal rights within the larger social changes and the political implications they may have. The “animal” has recently become one of the most popular topics in various fields in humanities and social sciences in South Korea, hugely influenced by the “more than human” turn, on the one hand, and by animal rights discourses, on the other. However, many of them tend to focus strictly on animal-human relations or be overridden by related literature and theoretical discussions. As anthropologists, I think we have to first attend to what’s really going on in the field. It turned out that my research focuses more on the “social” aspects of animal-human relations and their embeddedness in the broader social realm. I do not think the social excludes the non-human, although some may argue so. The symbolic aspect as much as the material one constitutes the human-animal (non-human) relationship.

HK: What are “uncaptured excesses” and “enchantment” that you write about with your low-income women interlocutors who volunteer at the ARA dog shelter, that cannot be consumed by the logic of labor or feminized exploitation?

EJ: So, if feminized exploitation could be what explains the relationship between the women at ARA and the wider politics of animal rights and animal welfare that dominantly rely on their passionate labor, “uncaptured excesses” was the term with which I was trying to capture the aspect of women’s engagements that cannot be subsumed by the logic of labor. The situation where most of them literally did not see what they do at ARA as “labor” or “work for wage,” came to the shelter seeking a way to relieve their griefs, and finally found it difficult to leave the shelter when their bodies and souls were literally aching due to the intensity routinely involved could not be explained by any better term than “enchantment.” I thought they were enchanted by the relationships they had at shelter. And, this reminded me of what Silvia Federici (2012) named the double character inherent in reproductive labor that not only integrates one into labor market but also disintegrates one from it. Attending to this aspect of enchantment led me to a careful but positive validation of the possibilities it may lead us to.

HK: What did you learn from this research that you didn’t expect to find?

EJ: Well, I guess there are many that I didn’t expect to find. To give you one example, I didn’t expect that I would enjoy interacting with dogs so much. (Laughs). You know, I am a cat person. There were many, including the intensity of interaction, I didn’t think I would ever like when I saw them from afar. But, I came to like interacting with those dogs at ARA shelter so that I would be actually eager for the next field visit only to meet them, despite the labor I had to do at every visit had left me with muscle pains. For sure, these dogs had distinct characters and faces that were pulling me to them. I would even joke to people that I came to know of gae mat (the taste of dog) with this fieldwork! Anyway, my own experience as such made me better understand the staff members of ARA. What made them stuck there was not so much some “graceful” or altruistic motivations (as the discourse of interspecies pity makes us to believe) as the mutual enchantments that in turn made them to “care.”