In Korea cats and dogs are both pets and food. This article looks at how Korean activists bring the issue of animal welfare to the attention of Korean society in the context of cat and dog meat consumption. It explores the ways in which activists deploy rescue narratives in order to attract families willing to adopt rescued animals, thus transforming people's perception of livestock animals into that of potential lifetime companions. Combined here are the Confucian virtue of impartial benevolence and 18th‐century Western moral philosophy.
Categorizing non-human animals (henceforth "animals") as human commodities implies reducing their lives to mere market values. However, precisely because some of these animals' lives and experiences are complex, such commodification often leads to a form of resistance from the animals commodified. Therefore, examining the many ways in which animals are commodified also requires one to focus on the many ways in which animals resist their own commodification. At the same time, since resistance tends to require a response from the resisted, looking at resistance also implies exploring the ways in which the resisted react to those who resist commodification. It thus appears necessary to explore commodification and resistance alongside the impact that this resistance can have on the resisted/commodifier and how, in some cases, this response has agency in triggering a significant transformation.However, defining animal resistance in the context of their commodification is far from straightforward. We see this Special Issue as a way to provide potential avenues for exploring both resistance and commodification and the ways in which they intertwine.First, we agree with Kohn that resistance and agency are not the same thing, yet that both notions are useful and interconnected (2013). Nonhuman agency, roughly conceived as the ability to act independently and, by doing so, to make some sort of difference to other entities/actors, takes many forms and exists within as well as beyond human structures (Kohn 2013, 91). However, it is not the topic explored here. Rather, our focus is on animal resistance in the context of their commodification, a relation which necessarily emerges within a human structure. Nonetheless, the specific forms of animal resistance that emerge from their
In this article, a Sartrian existentialist framework will be applied to the experiences of humannonhuman animal intersubjectivity related to me by a handful of small-scale farmers in England and France. Applying a Sartrian lens to these accounts reveals that when animals resist their own commodification, both the farmer (the 'resisted') and the nonhuman animal (the 'resistant') become engaged in a mutually constitutive existential exchange. The article features the argument that some farmers have their subjectivities challenged through the process of animal resistance to their own commodification, and that Sartre's existentialism is a very potent framework in which to explore not only the psychological struggle but also the transformation process that some scale-farmers experience as a result of this resistance. The article shows that these farmers see themselves as witnesses to the fact that individual animals do matter beyond their mere substance, and that awareness needs to be raised for other farmers who face a similar existential struggle.
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