Fighting Animals

gainst a tree and pawing the earth. The narrator says they are fighting over a piece of fish. They attack each other with bites to the neck in an enclosure with vertical steel bars. Then the film is spliced and the viewer sees two foxes with wet fur in a different cage built of fine-mesh chicken wire. After a few violent seconds, the scene instantly cuts back to the cage of vertical bars and the scene ends when one fox locks into the other with a death bite.

In another scene, a lioness and a tiger are trapped in what appears to be a zoo cage. The background is of iron bars and fake rocks made of poured concrete. The animals growl. Though there is no explanation of why the two are poised to fight, it is assumed the battle is between two territorial animals being forced to share a small cage. The two tear into each other, with the lioness often fighting from her back.

From this brief scene, the narrator posits that the lioness is cowardly and the tiger is the more powerful of these alpha-predators, hinting at animistic nationalism, in the sense that “our native beast is stronger than the foreign beast”. The North Korean army chose the tiger as its symbolic mascot, named Hokuk-i, the “nation-defending tiger”. Similarly, the tiger is used in numerous symbols in South Korea. Yet in the past neither country has protected the cherished icon.

Korea’s Siberian tiger is is one of the most endangered large animals in the world. In pre-industrial Korea the tiger ranged throughout the peninsula, but the last confirmed sighting in South Korea was in 1946 in the Sorak mountain range. A few are thought to exist in the Baekdu Mountain region, but the lack of field evidence puts this in doubt. […]

But the tigers are not the only endangered species from the peninsula featured in the film. A lioness is matched with an Asiatic black bear, called by Koreans a half-moon bear because of the white crescent on its chest. The destruction of the native population of half-moon bears is a dark chapter in Korea. […]

With chronic shortages of all supplies and the country on the edge of famine, questions about the care of animals in a North Korean zoo would be natural. This film does little to provide assurances that Pyongyang Central Zoo animals are being properly looked after.