Paper short abstract:

Amidst local opposition and their own misgivings, animal rights activists in Kerala had no option but to feed starving animals during the pandemic. This paper charts the moral dilemmas and debates that they had to settle to ask how care can be defined when it cannot be easily logically defended.

Paper long abstract:

In Kerala, street dogs began to starve as the pandemic hit the state, as early as January 2020. Restaurants and grocery shops completely closed down, and the garbage dumps that were the regular food haunts of street dogs began to slim down. Attentive to these changing landscapes for the street dogs, local animal rights activists began to routinely feed them with the assistance of recruits they called “feeders”- animal lovers who were available only to feed the dogs and who by their own admission, could not do much more for the animals. This paper charts ethnographically the moral dilemmas the local activists had to settle to feed these dogs. Many of them believed that feeding them by routine every day at designated spots with palatable food would make them dependent on humans for food, and curtail their foraging prowess. Further, Kerala has a hostile history with street dogs seeing them as rabid beasts who are unpredictable and unruly. The activists had to constantly negotiate their positions in the local communities and not make themselves out to be too “extreme” or too “radical”. At the same time, they were bound by the question of care as an inescapable moral question that was closely connected to avoiding death. Here, care did not carry logical consistency of action, but a moral acuity that was foremostly concerned with ensuring the street dogs’ survival. How can we understand this concerted effort of “care” in terms of providing food for the starving dogs?