Free-roaming bovids in Hong Kong, worlding the more-than-human care

Living on an ailing planet undergoing the Anthropocene epoch, more-than-human care is an essential obligation we must embrace to thrive alongside multispecies communities. However, when we discuss, practice and speculate about co-living with multispecies others and building more-than-human commons, we must not forget ‘the awkwardness of being together in multispecies entanglements’. When an animal does not fit into existing conventional categories and urban protocols, and when human care motivations and consequences lead to troubling ambivalences, how can we further comprehend, practice and imagine care and being cared for amid these awkward relations? This research article explores one such situated awkward entanglement and care network involving the free-roaming bovids in Hong Kong through a multifaceted worlding approach, utilising a diverse range of materials, including historical archives, field research and art projects. I will first historicise the human–bovids relationship in Hong Kong, tracing its evolution from the city’s agricultural past through the colonial ordering of civility to the ongoing neoliberal urban development schemes that render the bovids as ‘awkward’ animals. Then, I will examine current bovids care projects, which range from government policy and scientific endeavours to grassroots initiatives, as forms of complicated more-than-human care worlding. I will highlight the inherited tensions and interdisciplinary dialogues that gradually foreground the bovids’ own agency within the care paradigm. Finally, I will explore several creative and artistic works that engage with and experiment on the complexity of the local human-bovid entanglement, pointing to alternative ways to address the awkwardness and acknowledging the bovids as active care agents through their worlding. By examining these multifaceted awkward engagements in the more-than-human care network of the Hong Kong bovids, we may find some light on the current developmental plight and biodiversity loss. This article is part of the special issue ‘Re-creating Care as Mattering Practices’.