CHAPTER 14

Human-Animal Relationships and Extension of Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hyeonbin Park and Dolly Jørgensen

Introduction

The history of the SARS-COVID-19 pandemic is a “multispecies story.”1 While much scientific study has focused on the transmission of COVID from and to animals—pathogen spillover from wildlife, the role of laboratory animals in transmission, and companion animals or wild animals acting as intermediate hosts—perhaps more importantly, the virus has affected human-animal relations beyond passing on a contagion. COVID has structured multispecies interactions through both limitation and opportunity. The pandemic offers the prospect to reflect upon how those relations work, especially in times of crisis.

Animals are typically categorized and mobilized according to their relations with humans, falling into categories such as lab animals, wild animals, and companion animals.2 Studies about human-animal relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic reflect these divisions. Studies of companion animals during the pandemic have focused on the domestic ties between humans and their coinhabitants. Research has found that companion animals acted as sources of mental and physical support during the lockdowns,3 with booming dog adoption numbers as people looked to household pets for interaction and to combat loneliness.4 Owners were also concerned about their pets due to restrictions on going outside under COVID-19 countermeasures.5 Research on lab animals in the pandemic has focused on biological questions such as the animal models for developing vaccines, including human experimental subjects’ perception of animal testing in the development of the vaccine.6 Scholarship on wildlife has investigated wildlife trades that may promote pathogen spillover along with intensive livestock production, land-use change, and climate change, engaging the One Health approach.7 Urging strong regulation of wildlife trade and consumption has been a typical conclusion in this line of research.8 The closures in the wake of the pandemic (the “Anthropause”) have been understood as a research opportunity for wildlife conservation in trying to understand how human activities normally affect wildlife.9 Case studies on the effect of protective countermeasures on wild animals have begun to appear, such as a study of the impact of face masks on wildlife.10

While most of the scholarship on animals during COVID are scientific or veterinary studies, focused on the management of health and welfare of animals and humans, there has been some humanistic and social science attention to human-animal entanglement in the pandemic. Environmental and media historians have offered short reflections on how animal histories might contribute to an analysis of COVID.11 Geographers Turnbull, Searle, and Adams show that quarantine conditions of COVID led to increased digital encounters with animals, perhaps permanently expanding some of the geographies of encounter.12 Analyzing digital encounters with aquarium and zoo animals, Figueroa-Schultz argues that digital encounters with animals under conditions of closure without normal human interaction “embody the concerns of our current historical moment, evoking anxieties over environmental degradation and speculation about our unknown future.”13 Whether we understand these interactions as empowering or debilitating, we can say for certain that there were emergent relationalities between humans and animals during the COVID-19 pandemic.14

Care is a particularly salient interest of “engaged environmental humanities” exploring human-animal relationships.15 Care has been studied by feminist scholars as relational action, an “activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”16 Building on this, attention to care in the environmental humanities goes further than the border of “we” humans and “our” world by moving toward nonhuman living beings. This extension is based on the understanding that species other than humans are engaging in worlding together.17 For those scholars who have concerns about endangered species, extinction, and critical analysis of human-animal relationships, care is required for species to flourish with humans in shared worlds.18

Feminist theorist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explains three constituents of care: “a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labor.”19 Care emerges from the embodied interaction between different bodies that affect each other.20 Care itself is an ethical response to others and is limited not to epistemic concerns but also requires practical actions to look after others—the doings stressed by Puig de la Ballacasa. Since care involves different bodies, values, and practical means, it is inevitably political, involving power dynamics among heterogeneous humans and nonhumans. Therefore, care should be critically analyzed by raising questions in regard to power embedded in care practices: “What am I really caring for, why, and at what cost to whom?”21

This chapter investigates how the care of/for animals functioned during the COVID pandemic. We examine two cases in which humans extended care to animals that were dependent on human interventions for daily provisioning: animals in zoos and at temples in Asia. We reveal the fragility of shared human-animal ecologies and vulnerability in the lockdowns that disrupted standard routines of care.

Case 1: Caring for the Caged

COVID-19 was initially framed as a public health issue. The main interest of public health authorities was to understand how the novel coronavirus was spreading and infecting people and how severely the infected people were suffering. Countermeasures were put into place. People had to wear masks inside buildings and, in some areas, outside as well. People were asked to wash their hands frequently and use germ-killing hand sanitizers. Outside activities were restricted. Events, where a large number of people would gather, were canceled or held online. The problems caused by the disconnection of people were a lower priority than stopping the virus’s spread.

About one year after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported in South Korea,22 public attention began to extend to the hidden dimensions of COVID-19. For example, zoos that were once crowded with children, their parents, students, and couples became silent, prompting concerns about unseen zoo animals. However, this silence was only from the visitors’ perspective. Zoos have never been silent in, for example, academic literature and research; the history of zoos is uproarious, intertwined with colonial and scientific practices, the ideology of human mastery of nature, international animal trading, naturalistic representation of animals, zoo policy for species conservation, and so on.23 Recent studies about zoos have shifted scholarly attention to the zoo animals themselves, who have never been silent as agents and individuals.24 While visitors were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were still some who paid close attention to the voices of animals in zoos.

Zoo animals in captivity require care and caretakers. In South Korea, complaints surfaced about the welfare of zoo animals when they could not be seen by visitors during the pandemic. One journalist wrote an exposé about how animals in a “nature-friendly ecological experiential zoo,” unlike its name, had been ill-treated under the facility’s long-term closure during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.25 The private theme park, which has various rides, exhibitions, performance facilities, and a zoo, was ill-attended to due to the long-term shutdown during the pandemic. Opened in 2019, it has been repeatedly closed and reopened during the COVID crisis since February 2020.

According to that exposé, an anonymous local resident informant, hereafter referred to as K, first discovered horses locked in cages while walking in the theme park for exercise during the COVID restrictions in March 2020: “I heard a thump from somewhere. I followed the sound and found the horse banging its head into an empty water bowl.” K guided the journalist to see the tragic conditions of zoo animals: The geese were drinking water on the floor; the bowl feeders and water bowls in the exhibition room, filled with feces, were always empty; many animals, including a goose, a goat, a monkey, and a raccoon were captive in desperate places of the exhibition hall; a goat was tied up to with a rope; and a monkey was left in a room where icicles formed. Some animals were still in their cages, but there were concerns that they had been abandoned by their keepers under the pandemic situation.

Realizing that facility management could not or would not do it, K voluntarily cared for the animals, such as horses, goats, and geese, for about ten months. K brought bottles of water, carrots, apples, sweet potatoes, etc. in boxes, visiting the zoo twice a day. K had to climb the mountain where the zoo is located three times a day while bringing the boxes of water and food. Consequently, it took eight hours a day to gather and distribute food to animals and clean up the surroundings.

In the journalist’s telling, K was affected by those animals in need of care and had a history of caring for stray cats. This suggests that being concerned about animals is a significant part of K’s identity and that K’s activity was based on sympathy toward vulnerable animals. Her care practices also involved an affective dimension: “It would not have been possible without the sheep and horses that flocked to the fence when K came, and the monkeys that burrowed into K’s arms while cleaning the cage.” At the same time, caring practices are sometimes followed by “compassion fatigue,”26 which is observed by workers in animal shelters due to the psychological stress involved in caring for animals. K admitted the difficulties of visiting the zoo and caring for animals every day but could not ignore the animals’ suffering.

Although zookeepers struggled to provide care for animals during the pandemic, in part because institutions and individuals struggled financially, such abandonment was not universal.27 In a more professional zoo, such as that run by the Korea National Institute of Ecology (NIE), staff members in the zoo tried to control the spread of disease to animals via zookeepers or through visitors. The number of visitors was restricted by governmental measures, but concerns from zookeepers drove many specific policies. They were worried about not only themselves being infected but also the zoo animals being infected by people. They worried about the lack of care when they had to go into quarantine. Young-jun Kim, director of the NIE Animal Management and Research Office, noted, “If one worker becomes infected, everyone who worked that day together has to go into quarantine in their home. And because they have to be quarantined for more than a week, animals may not be managed.”

Zookeepers responded by developing tactics to avoid a care gap. They split the office members into three groups to work in separate spaces and forbade having meals together. According to this tactic, even though one person who became COVID-positive would force the isolation of the person’s group, members in other groups could continue to work. When someone went into quarantine, the workload of caring for animals was passed to other workers. Yet even this was a challenge, as there were not enough offices for them to stay in at their institution, so some staff had to work in small spaces without windows. They endured these conditions not knowing when the pandemic would end. Fortunately, workers at the zoo in the NIE as a governmental institution were not unemployed because the zoo operation is funded by taxpayers, unlike the private zoo that faced immediate financial difficulties during COVID restrictions. Still, in these distinct examples, there were many challenges to providing care for the vulnerable and interconnected bodies in zoological contexts during the pandemic.

Case 2: Devoted to Temple Animals

Humans and animals coconstruct mutual ecologies through their interactions with physical environments and navigation through social networks. Understanding this coconstitution of ecologies as natureculture breaks down the artificial dualism between humans and the nonhuman world.28 Under COVID restrictions, these natureculture entanglements were visible in places where they started to fray. In this section we use the case of temple animals, which required special forms of care when long-standing mutual ecologies were disrupted during lockdowns.

Monkeys are prominent residents at some Asian temple sites, where they coconstruct ecologies with humans. Research on Bali, Indonesia, has shown that the Balinese people and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) have cocreated mutually dependent relationships. These interactions go many ways: macaques are attributed spiritual meaning; macaque populations congregate at Hindu temple sites; Hindus give the monkeys ritual food offerings; the tourism industry promotes the tourist-macaque interface; the local populations receive financial benefit from the tourists; and the macaque diets are modified by tourist provisioning.29 The interconnections in these relationships demonstrate their natureculture character, as the daily rhythms of life for both humans and monkeys are coconstituted.30 This is not to imply that all human-macaque relationships are harmonious, as macaques are also known to cause crop damage, raid vendor stalls, and act aggressively toward temple visitors.31

Long before SARS-CoV-2 appeared on the scene, there were concerns that temple monkeys pose threats of zoonotic transmission of infectious diseases, including the herpes B virus and Simian virus 40 if humans are exposed to bodily fluids from the monkeys. Researchers have recommended that feeding macaques should be restricted to trained personnel (no visitor feeding) and that persons living near monkey temples should be educated to avoid behavior that might lead to bites.32 Yet such research has not measurably affected the popularity of visiting monkey temples or interacting with their residents. When COVID-19 appeared, researchers warned that it had the potential to infect wild primates and that the animals could become a reservoir for the virus.33

When the COVID lockdowns were put in place, the mutual ecologies of humans and monkeys at temples was disrupted. As temples closed and people were forbidden from visiting, animals that had become accustomed to feeding were at risk of going hungry. While wild primates at temples may also forage in local forests in some locations, at others they are heavily dependent on human-provided food.34 At the Hindu Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, the response to the lack of temple visitors bringing food was that a group of staff members and volunteers started efforts to feed the temple monkeys twice a day. A newspaper article about the feeding efforts featured two photographs of two volunteers in masks and gloves handing out bread to the monkeys and another photo of a Hindu holy man (without protection) feeding another group.35 Sacks of corn were also brought out daily to feed pigeons at the temple. These gestures reveal care by the temple authorities and local inhabitants. They were actively doing care to mend the relations that would be broken with no temple visitors. The monkeys were understood as dependent on the humans, in need of provision, such as the monkey in Figure 14.1 receiving a banana from a masked tourist after the sites were opened up during the pandemic.

But the monkeys in such closed temples were not just passive parts of the ecosystem. The crab-eating macaques of Phra Prang Sam Yot temple in Lopburi, Thailand, began searching for food in the local town immediately after the temple closed to visitors.36 The temple monkeys had grown accustomed to being fed by site tourists on a daily basis, but few tourists were coming in light of the coronavirus outbreak.37 When this food source disappeared, troops of monkeys left the temple area to look elsewhere, ending up in conflict with other local monkey populations. A video posted online showed hundreds of monkeys brawling in the streets.38 Local residents quickly laid out food offerings at the temple to entice the temple monkeys back and calm the situation.

But the monkey menace has also prompted an alternate response: a sterilization program. In June 2020, the government restarted an existing monkey sterilization program that had been stopped three years prior.39 This response was formulated as a way of caring for the human population of Lopburi, who would experience fewer disruptions to their lives and businesses as they struggled under the tight pandemic restrictions, and as a way of caring for the macaques, who would get into fewer dangerous situations. The sterilization program, which was only targeting five hundred individuals, is not expected to get rid of the macaques, but it is hoped that their numbers will decline to a more manageable size in time.

In November 2021 the Lopburi monkeys were once again in the news because the annual Monkey Festival, which had been canceled in November 2020 due to the pandemic, was back. Thousands of macaques gorged on two tons of fruit brought in by locals while tourists snapped photographs.40 Tourist income had been named in 2020 as a reason for keeping the monkeys, so perhaps the return of tourists will increase the acceptance for monkey misbehavior as it did in pre-COVID days.41

Pandemic closure of temple sites meant that temple macaques were no longer getting daily food provisions, disrupting the established ecologies coconstructed by humans and monkeys. Local populations extended care to the animals, volunteering to provide food, much of which would have previously been provided by tourists. Alternative forms of care, including the forced sterilization of the monkeys, also emerged. Puig de la Bellacasa has argued that care is relational and consists of doings engaged with “inescapable troubles of interdependent existences.”42 COVID care for temple monkeys—the doings in this mutual ecology—was relational, just as it was before and after the COVID pandemic. The relationality is so profound that even a global pandemic could not significantly disrupt it.

Conclusion

As a “multispecies story,”43 COVID reveals not only how viruses are transmitted across species lines but also how human-animal relationships were disturbed and emerged in various contexts amid the pandemic. This chapter illustrates this via cases of zoo animals in South Korea and temple monkeys in Southeast Asia. In both cases, the webs of care that sustained animal lives were interrupted by pandemic lockdowns and then reemerged in new ways.

The zoo animals and temple monkeys experienced deprivation during the COVID lockdowns because food was not provided by either zookeepers or tourists as before. The suffering experienced by animals neglected due to zoo closures—hunger, cold, and filth—was exactly the opposite of what zoos promise to offer animals as caretakers. Even the “wild” monkeys at temples were not receiving the care they had grown accustomed to for survival. This reminds us that the social distancing policies to prevent infectious diseases during the pandemic created populations, both human and animal, that were not cared for enough and were even forgotten. Human and animal bodies share predicaments of limited care in multiple and complex ways.

Animals’ lives in both the zoo and the temple context are fostered by the logic of biopolitics.44 Animals are provided with safe places to stay and regular foods, without the threat of predators and the need to search for food. Their populations are maintained by biopolitical science and management. This puts them at the whim of humans. When animals are no longer engaged with humans, they might not receive care for survival. The disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a window into the care environments for these animals.

However, both cases also showed different relationalities that emerged between humans and animals during the pandemic. In both cases, some people extended care work to animals in need of help, outside of the typical modes of care. A voluntary citizen cared for unattended zoo animals by feeding them for ten months. Local residents near temples provided food to monkeys in place of tourists, although this was mutually beneficial, smoothing possible conflicts when monkeys tried to obtain food themselves.

This emergent care work sheds critical light on animal dependence on human action in many situations. Even if voluntary care for zoo animals could fill a temporary gap, it cannot replace all the zookeepers’ work. The void of care was created not by lazy workers but instead by a bigger problem of the pandemic political economy that deprives zookeepers’ employment. And while local people fed monkeys, the Thai government restarted a sterilization program to control the monkey populations to deal with the disturbance caused by monkeys trespassing in human areas. Care work during the COVID era opens a critical discussion on how human-animal relationships are bound to different levels of vulnerabilities under the controlling structure of the political economy and the state’s biopower.

How can we imagine human-animal relationships in a post-COVID world? Human-animal relationships will always be relational, not fixed. They are open to the emergence of contingent practices and relationalities while simultaneously being tied to power dynamics usually dominated by humans. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to reflect on the human-animal coconstituted world. Drawing insight from disaster studies, a crisis can reveal informal and mutual solidarity networks that may challenge the role of the state in providing care.45 The extended care work in our examples shows one possibility for novel forms of care in times of crisis. More inquiries can and should be made into alternative relationalities that go beyond the dominant influence of political economy and population control. One way is to pursue “multispecies justice” that extends the subject and practices of justice toward other species “with their own radically diverse life projects, capacities, phenomenologies, ways of being, functioning, forms of integrity, and relationalities.”46 This kind of justice requires recognizing shared human and animal vulnerabilities and working actively to provide care across species lines.

Notes

1. 1.  Eben Kirksey, “The Emergence of COVID-19: A Multispecies Story,” Anthropology Now 12, no. 1 (2020): 11.
2. 2.  Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (Columbia University Press, 2012).
3. 3.  Emily Shoesmith et al., “The Influence of Human-Animal Interactions on Mental and Physical Health During the First COVID-19 Lockdown Phase in the U.K.: A Qualitative Exploration,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 3 (2021): 976.
4. 4.  Liat Morgan et al., “Human–Dog Relationships During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Booming Dog Adoption During Social Isolation,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7 (2020): article 155.
5. 5.  Jennifer W. Applebaum et al., “The Concerns, Difficulties, and Stressors of Caring for Pets During COVID-19: Results from a Large Survey of U.S. Pet Owners,” Animals 10, no. 10 (2020): article 1882.
6. 6.  César Muñoz-Fontela et al., “Animal Models for COVID-19,” Nature 586, no. 7830 (2020): 509–15; and Samantha Vanderslott et al., “Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects: Exploring the Views of UK COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants on Animal Testing,” Society, Technology and Human Values 48, no. 4 (2023): 909–37.
7. 7.  Odette K. Lawler et al., “The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Intricately Linked to Biodiversity Loss and Ecosystem Health,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 11 (2021); and D. Katterine Bonilla-Aldana et al., “Revisiting the One Health Approach in the Context of COVID-19: A Look into the Ecology of This Emerging Disease,” Advances in Animal and Veterinary Sciences 8, no. 3 (2020).
8. 8.  Nian Yang et al., “Permanently Ban Wildlife Consumption,” Science 367, no. 6485 (2020): 1434–1435.
9. 9.  Christian Rutz et al., “Covid-19 Lockdown Allows Researchers to Quantify the Effects of Human Activity on Wildlife,” Nature Ecology and Evolution 4, no. 9 (2020): 1156–59; and Raoul Manenti et al., “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Covid-19 Lockdown Effects on Wildlife Conservation: Insights from the First European Locked Down Country,” Biological Conservation 249 (2020): 108728.
10. 10.  Patrício Silva et al., “Risks of Covid-19 Face Masks to Wildlife: Present and Future Research Needs,” Science of the Total Environment 792 (2021): 148505.
11. 11.  Peter Alagona, “All of Us, Animals,” Hao Chen, “Nonhuman Animals in a Human Pandemic: Past and Present,” and Dolly Jørgensen, “Tracking Animals in a Pandemic,” contributions to “Reflections: Environmental History in the Era of COVID-19,” special issue of Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 595–686
12. 12.  Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, and William M. Adams, “Quarantine Encounters with Digital Animals: More-Than-Human Geographies of Lockdown Life,” Journal of Environmental Media 1, no. 1 (2020): 6.1–6.10.
13. 13.  Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, “Abandoned Aquariums: Online Animal Attractions During Quarantine,” Journal of Environmental Media 1, Supplement 1 (2020): 5.3.
14. 14.  Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, and Jamie Lorimer, “After the Anthropause: Lockdown Lessons for More-Than-Human Geographies,” Geographical Journal 187, no. 1 (2021): 69–77.
15. 15.  Thom van Dooren, “Care,” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 293.
16. 16.  Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge, 1993), 103.
17. 17.  Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23.
18. 18.  Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); and Myung-Ae Choi, “More-Than-Human Geographies of Nature: Toward a Careful Political Ecology,” Journal of the Korean Geographical Society 51, no. 5 (2016): 613–32; and van Dooren, “Care.”
19. 19.  María Puig de la Bellacasa, “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care,” Sociological Review 60, no. 2 (2012): 197.
20. 20.  Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis,” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 111–34.
21. 21.  van Dooren, “Care,” 293.
22. 22.  The first COVID-19 confirmed case was reported in South Korea on January 20, 2020. Changjin Lee, “Health Authorities on Alert . . . First Confirmed Case of Novel Coronavirus,” Medical Times, January 20, 2020, https://www.medicaltimes.com/Main/News/NewsView.html?ID=1131506.
23. 23.  Tracy McDonald and Daniel Vandersommers, eds., Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).
24. 24.  See the essays in McDonald and Vandersommers, Zoo Studies.
25. 25.  Jisook Kim, “Animals That Survived by Licking the Floor . . . Residents Took Care of Them for 10 Months,” Hankyoreh, February 3, 2021 [In Korean], https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/animalpeople/human_animal/981603.html. The zoo under critique was located in a theme park at the foot of Juam Mountain in Daegu Metropolitan City, an inland area of the southeastern part of South Korea. This part analyzed the case based on this reporting.
26. 26.  Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders, Regarding Animals (Temple University Press, 1996).
27. 27.  Interview with Young-jun Kim by Hyeonbin Park, June 10, 2022. Young-jun Kim has been caring for wildlife for about twenty years as one of the pioneers of wildlife veterinary science in South Korea. Now he mostly works at the Ecorium, which is an exhibition hall encompassing a zoo and a botanic garden at the NIE. He oversees the exhibition and takes care of animal welfare there. The use of this interview data in this chapter was allowed by the interviewee and the interviewers.
28. 28.  Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.
29. 29.  Agustín Fuentes, “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, Ethnoprimatology,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 600–24.
30. 30.  Nicholas Malone and Kathryn Ovenden, “Natureculture,” in The International Encyclopedia of Primatology, ed. Agustín Fuentes (Wiley, 2017).
31. 31.  Fuentes, “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali.”
32. 32.  Lisa Jones-Engel et al., “Temple Monkeys and Health Implications of Commensalism, Kathmandu, Nepal,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 6 (2006): 900–6.
33. 33.  Susan Lappan et al., “The Human-Primate Interface in the New Normal: Challenges and Opportunities for Primatologists in the COVID-19 Era and Beyond,” American Journal of Primatology 82 (2020): e23176.
34. 34.  Lappan et al., “The Human-Primate Interface in the New Normal.”
35. 35.  Binaj Gurubacharya, “Volunteers Feed Hungry Animals at Nepal’s Revered Shrine,” AP News, April 13, 2020, https://apnews.com/9e26b2f944c0c52158fee436c8fe281a.
36. 36.  “Monkey Brawl in Lop Buri Shocks Humans,” Bangkok Post, March 11, 2020, https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1876489/monkey%2010brawl%2010in%2010lop%2010buri%2010shocks%2010humans.
37. 37.  Asaree Thaitrakulpanich, “Lopburi’s Monkeys Food War Blamed on Plunge in Tourism,” Khaosod English, March 12, 2020, https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/2020/03/12/lopburis-monkeys-food-war-blamed-on-plunge-in-tourism/.
38. 38.  “Hungry Monkeys Brawl over Food as Coronavirus Hits Tourism in Thailand—Video,” The Guardian, March 13, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/mar/13/hungry-monkeys-brawl-over-food-as-coronavirus-hits-tourism-in-thailand-video.
39. 39.  “Macaque Attack: Humans Try to Take Back Lop Buri,” Bangkok Post, June 24, 2020. https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/1940232.
40. 40.  “Fruit Galore: Thai Monkey Festival Returns as Tourists Come Back,” Reuters, November 29, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fruit-galore-thai-monkey-festival-returns-tourists-come-back-2021-11-28/.
41. 41.  “Macaque Attack.”
42. 42.  Puig de la Bellacasa, “Nothing Comes Without Its World,” 199.
43. 43.  Kirksey, “The Emergence of COVID-19,” 11.
44. 44.  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (Vintage, 1990); and Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitro, and Steve Hinchliffe, eds., Humans, Animals, and Biopolitics: The More-Than-Human Condition (Routledge, 2016).
45. 45.  Jacob A. C. Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
46. 46.  Danielle Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics,” Environmental Politics 30, nos. 1–2 (2021): 127.