Two dogs with one stone? Urban markets and the dog meat trade in South Korea during the Covid-19 pandemic

While the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to global light the zoonotic risks in Asian markets where animals are sold alive, ideas about material proximity between humans and animals have taken a specific meaning in South Korea, where the tradition of eating dog meat has been instrumental in the national construction. In this article, we describe how the regulation of urban markets in three municipalities launched in the past decades has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing to the margins of South Korean cities the slaughter of live animals in cages. On the basis of interviews conducted with dog retailers, we explore the opposite view of dog trading as taking part to a metabolic and symbolic order, both as recyclers of waste and as carriers of virtues of resistance. We finally follow the arguments of animal activists and veterinarians, who develop views on shared feelings and affects between humans and dogs based on kinship relations and narratives of co-evolution. We thus show that taking the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate the modernisation of urban markets leaves out two alternative views on human-animal relations that also exist in contemporary South Korean society.