Free roaming bovids in Hong Kong, a complicated more-than human care project

Living on an ailing planet undergoing the Anthropocene epoch, more-than-human care is an essential obligation we need to take on in order to survive and flourish with multispecies communities (Bellacasa 2017). However, when we discuss, practice, and speculate about coliving with multispecies others, building more-than-human commons, we need not to forget “the awkwardness of being together in multispecies entanglements” (Ginn et al., 2014, 113). When the animal being doesn’t fit in existing conventional categories and urban protocols, when the human care motivations and consequences result in troublesome ambivalences, how do we further comprehend, practice, and imagine care and being cared for when entangled in these awkward relations? This work-in-progress paper explores one such situated awkward entanglement with the free-roaming bovids in Hong Kong. I will first historicize the Hong Kong human-bovids relation from the city’s agricultural past and ongoing neoliberal urban development schemes, which produce the bovids as an “awkward” animal. Then I will examine the current bovids care projects ranging from government policy to grassroots initiatives as forms of complicated more-than-human care projects. Last but not least, I will explore several creative and artistic works that further engage and experiment with the complexity of the local human-bovids entanglement, pointing to a possible way to engage with the awkwardness and acknowledging the bovids as active care agents. Through examining these multifaceted awkward engagements in the more-than-human care project between humans and bovids, we may find some light on the current developmental plight. Copyright © 2023 The Education University of Hong Kong.