Korean Job Discussion Forums

JadeKitty · Joined: 04 Jan 2006

Are there many feral cats in Deju? I am planning on doing a cross-cultural study on feral cat behavior and local people's attitude toward them for a master's degree in environmental studies, and I am thinking of combining it with a teaching job. Would Deju be a good place to do a study?

schwa · Joined: 18 Jan 2003 Location: Yap

Jeju? Daegu? Anyway wherever you go you'll spot homeless cats.

Not sure what you expect to observe though -- they eat garbage & run when people approach.

JadeKitty · Joined: 04 Jan 2006

I meant Jeju...

Dan The Chainsawman · Joined: 05 May 2005

Do you think you could swing a grant for this study?

pet lover · Joined: 02 Jan 2004 Location: not in Seoul

Yes, there are feral cats on Jeju. Lots of them. Jeju doesn't exactly have harsh winters to kill them off and there is plenty of garbage for them to survive on. They look much like the mainland cats....deformed tails and all. They are quite shy and even if you try throwing food to them, they'll completely disappear within a mere second. The ones I met up with are not afraid of small dogs...especially since many of them are BIGGER than my dogs. They were actually almost friendly to my dogs. That is what I found to be the strangest thing of all.

JeJuJitsu · Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Location: McDonald's

Yep, lotsa cats here, but they are harder to set on fire here than they are back in Texas.

BigBlackEquus · Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2006 4:45 pm Post subject:

There are lots of homeless ELDERLY on Jeju, too.

I was told that it is not uncommon for poor Koreans to "dump" off a senile grandparent somewhere on Jeju, so they don't have to feed another mouth. My Korean coworkers were talking about this phenomena one day. They said that there are quite a few homeless elderly living there who suffer from alzheimers, and were dumped there by families who just wanted to leave them in a nice place and forget about them.

Kind of a reverse abortion?

Hollywoodaction · Joined: 02 Jul 2004

Well, here's a story for you.

About 7 years ago, one of my roommates returned to the US but couldn't bring her cat, so we 'adopted' it. A few weeks later, the cat snuck out the door and bolted. It usually returned after 15 minutes or so, but it never came back. We searched for it around the neighborhood, left the door open at night, and put out cat food for nearly 2 weeks. Still no sign of it...until a year later when I was about to move out of the building. My then other ex-roommate and I were about to drive away in her car to meet some friends when she spotted a cat hiding under a car. "Doesn't that look like our cat?", she asked. "Can't be. There's no way he could still be alive", I replied. So, we managed to get the cat to come out from its hiding place (we neted it with a jacket). Surprise of surprises, it really was our cat. It had spent a year fending for itself in the alley behind our building.