Multispecies Justice beyond Animal Rights: Saebyeogi (새벽이) Sanctuary on Instagram (2023)

Multispecies Justice beyond Animal Rights: Saebyeogi (새벽이) Sanctuary on Instagram Su Young Choi (bio) an animal sanctuary is a facility that provides a temporary or permanent safe haven to animals in need (Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries 2022). Saebyeogi (새벽이) Sanctuary (the animal sanctuary for Saebyeogi) is South Korea's first animal sanctuary, built in Gyeonggi Province in May 2020. "Saebyeogi" is the name of a pig that the animal rights activists of Direct Action Everywhere Korea rescued from a factory farm in Hwaseong on July 23, 2019. The activists and volunteers crowd-sourced and constructed the sanctuary to provide Saebyeogi with a space to live. This Interface feature views the animal sanctuary as a site of animal rights activism that has potential to contest foodways and shape culinary culture in contemporary Korea, particularly in relation to challenging prior notions of what we can and cannot or should and should not eat. The article further argues that Saebyeogi Sanctuary is a political space that allows its participants to experience and practice multispecies justice in the South Korean context. To support this argument, the rest of the article begins by describing the brief trajectory of the South Korean animal rights activism within which the emergence of the first animal sanctuary in 2020 is situated. Then, it unpacks the concept of multispecies justice as a lens through which to understand a set of practices related to the sanctuary. Last, it details the practices presented on Instagram as an indicator of the participants' experience and practice of multispecies justice in South Korea. Zooming in on the sanctuary's Instagram presence is worthwhile because it helps us understand how the social media texts of the animal sanctuary can mediate and compose the ideas of multispecies justice with which its participants attempt to redraw the boundaries of food and become self-reflecting agents of creating new values, meanings, and practices in eating. [End Page 62] EVOLVING KOREAN ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISM FROM "PROTECTION" TO "LIBERATION" The early 2000s was a period in Korea when we began to observe an increase in the number of households with companion animals like dogs and cats. Aligning with this change, various nonprofit organizations were founded to advocate for proper animal "protection" and "welfare" (e.g., the Korean Society for Animal Freedom in 1999, the Association for Loving Animals in 2002, Korea Animal Rights Advocates in 2005). Responding to the growth in numbers of abandoned or abused companion animals, these organizations mostly acted as charity organizations focused on rescuing and protecting companion animals (Kim 2013). A more active agenda to intervene into people's perception and consumption of animals as meat concentrated on dog meat, which had been triggered as problematic by the international attention that significantly magnified since Korea hosted the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul (Dugnoille 2014). While Korea achieved enactment of the Animal Protection Law that forbids cruel methods of killing animals (e.g., boiling animals alive to tenderize their flesh) in 2008, the reach of Korean animal rights activism largely stayed within the scope of companion animals, and those animals were perceived as adorable and vulnerable objects that needed humans' care and protection. At the same time, the first decade of the twenty-first century was also an era when the general Korean public was repeatedly exposed to news about the massive scale at which live farm animals were slaughtered due to the frequent occurrence of animal disease epidemics (e.g., 5.29 million chickens and ducks were slaughtered during the bird flu epidemic in 2003). This trend was not temporary but has continued because of the growth of the Korean animal agriculture industry and its style of factory farming (e.g., overcrowded, jam-packed breeding; mechanization) to meet the surge in consumption of meat and dairy products (Joo 2020). The traumatic experiences of workers and public servants mobilized to slaughter animals at a mass scale were covered by the news media, which ignited public discourse about the ethics of raising farm animals only to be eaten by humans (Mun 2019). Such consciousness was aligned with the foundation of the Korea Vegetarian Union as a nonprofit organization in 2005. Additionally, the 2000s was the time when animal-related TV...