It was a big beagly day at the Beagle Rescue Network shelter in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, when I visited in July 2019. The group’s head volunteer, Jeong Buyun, led me to a magical place full of wagging tails, inquisitive noses and muddy paws. I took the bullet train from Yongsan Station in Seoul early…
The first time I observed a Cube of Truth event in Myeong-dong, the busy shopping area in downtown Seoul, I’d followed the group’s activities on social media for some time. The activists were representing Anonymous for the Voiceless, and on Nov. 3, 2018, they were celebrating International Cube Day. “Anonymous for the Voiceless (AV) is…
Sometime around 2007, a woman I barely knew started a thread on a message board and addressed it to me. She made sure to tell me to fuck off in the subject line. Another member of the same site sent me a private message with the subject line “I found your picture.” The attachment showed…
Since I started my first blog sometime around 2008 or 2009, I’ve had to reevaluate my content strategy many times. My first blog was part tech experiment, part creative outlet, part rant. I wrote in response to social media discussions, events in the news and other blogs — mostly animal-oriented blogs from the same insular…
Looking back on my 2019 conversation with Heeji Yi, maybe I was too optimistic. The Korean animal rights activist was in her late 20s at the time and we met up at a café in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, just outside Seoul, to talk about her activism. Heeji had plunged into animal activism headfirst and was…