"동물농장," or "Close-Up Animals with a Wide-Angle Lens"

(Edit, April 5: Sorry, but the video player I had embedded was causing Internet Explorer to crash. I tried to steal them and stick them on youtube, but it didn't work, so instead I've just linked to the videos. You can find a lot more by navering 동물농장. Just be aware that, at least for me, that media player really slows down the computer. Not sure what the problem is.)

I like to watch animal shows on TV here, especially ones like 동물농장, which profiles people's strange pets or their unusual relationships with animals.



Apparently a recurring "character" in some of these is a cute little kid---nicknamed 장군아?---in Icheon who loves animals.

* Here he is feeding some puppies and visiting his grandparents. Lol @ him bowing to the dog.

* Here he is playing with, and drugging, a piglet.

* Here he is with his mother putting clothes on piglets:

* Again with the piglet.

* At the vet's office.

* And, finally, here is 장군아's mother exploiting his fear of pink rubber gloves:

Last week I caught an episode about a sheepdog who doubles as an office assistant. Two clips are available here and here, although none of them show the conclusion, when the employees gave him and some other dogs a bath in the middle of the office. Other quality episodes I recall include a woman raising a bunch of raccoons in her home, a family with their own family of prarie dogs, and an old woman who is obsessed with her Jindo dog "백구."

I think the show is cute and some of the episodes are heartwarming because I'm going through menopause. It's quite clear that the people featured truly love animals, and that provides some balance to the treatment of animals we usually see around here. Strangely, I get the complete opposite reaction whenever I see programs on Korean zoos. Because zoos exist here basically as a day's fun, zookeepers I've seen on the various animal programs appear part of the entertainment industry---playing with the animals, making the animals do tricks, mixing up species to see how they get along---whereas the amateurs profiled on 동물농장 and other similar shows have actually brought animals into their homes and into their lives. I'll leave it to more expert writers lay out how those Korean examples contrast to, say, public figures like Steve Irwin or Jack Hanna (both entertainers, but both involved in academic pursuits as well). Having actually been to animal displays in Korea, I feel confident in saying that playing with animals on talk shows or giving them silly voiceovers has not yet had a huge effect on how people react to zoos.


Stolen from here.

But as always, I need to add a disclaimer, and point out that people at my old place of work suffer from cranio-rectal inversion, too.