Q&A: LEAP Student Fellow Eui Young Kim ’25 Writes About Her Relationship with Animals
Eui Young Kim ’25 is third-year student at Yale Law School, a student fellow4 with the Law, Environment & Animals Program5 (LEAP), and co-chair of the Yale Animal Law Society. During her time at the Law School, she also worked as a research assistant for the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative6, collecting data on bird collisions around Yale’s campus.
To graduate, Yale Law School students must complete two significant writing requirements, which are closely supervised by Law School faculty members and typically center around legal research and writing. For one of her requirements, Kim undertook a unique project: a series of personal essays exploring her experiences with different animals — birds, farmed animals, ants, and cats — and the deep questions raised by those encounters. Kim discusses her essays and reflections on other animals.
What inspired you to write a series of personal essays for the Law School’s writing requirement? What has the writing process for this series been like?
I wanted to write about animals because I'm interested in animal law, and I also wanted to write about the bird walks I did with the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative. I didn't want to necessarily translate my personal reflections to a legal piece of writing. So I had the idea of writing a series of personal essays, which I suggested to Professor Doug Kysar. I don't think he really knew what to expect, but he said yes, which I’m grateful for. I wrote my first essay on birds and then everything else followed: I wrote about farmed animals and me being vegan, and I wrote about ants. The final essay is about cats, even though I don't currently have cats.
I used to write a lot until I went to college. I would write about what happened that day and how I felt about it. This series was very much in that tradition. I didn’t do legal research for these essays. Most of my time was spent trying to figure out how exactly I felt about things and what exactly I wanted to say.
What work did you do for the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative? What moved you to write about those experiences?
I was a research assistant for the Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, which meant that I went on weekly morning walks every migration season — in fall and spring — and recorded where I found birds who collided with windows. I then collected the birds’ bodies and dropped them off at the Peabody. I did this for three seasons. It was one of the most interesting things I did at law school. It's a very strange experience, having to encounter a dead animal up close when usually they're singing and flying and very much alive and part of the background. It's when they're dead and unnaturally still that you see that something is off — very off — and it took me a while to get used to that.
I didn't realize that bird collisions were a problem even when I was an undergrad at Yale. I'd spent so much time in New Haven, and I just didn't realize. It was shocking to me how many birds died. There was a question that I couldn't really resolve, which is not exactly what can be done about this — because there are technical solutions — but how much should we care? What should we be willing to do? Because the solutions are expensive. I don't know the answer. Even after working on this project, I still don't have a good answer.
In one essay, you reflect on your decision to be vegan. What brought you to that decision? How, if at all, did writing an essay about your own veganism shape your thinking about veganism in general?
Usually when I get asked this question, my short answer is that I read a lot of Peter Singer and that really influenced my thinking. And that's true, but I was not vegan for a long time even after reading Peter Singer. What really got me to put those ideas into practice was spending a lot of time with people who were vegan and seeing that this was a viable option for me.
The central question of this essay is how to live out your values in your everyday life and what values to live out. I don't think me being vegan really does anything. I don't think my actions as one person really have an impact. If you think of it like that, there's no reason to be vegan. But I have this belief that we shouldn’t harm animals for food and this idea that if you believe in something, it needs to change how you act. What’s the point of learning if you don't let what you learn change how you act? I don't have an answer as to why I prioritize this particular belief and not others, and if being vegan is more important than all the other beliefs I hold. That's another unresolved question.
This essay is also an ode to my friend Matt and my partner Arjun. It was really Matt who moved me to be vegan. It was the purity of his principle. But I’ve learned that when you're going through life, you need more than just your principle; you need support from other people. It would've been hard to keep being vegan if I didn't have a partner who supported me. Having said all of that, I have no clue how to move other people to be vegan because this is all very personal to me. If the reason I'm vegan and the reason I can keep being vegan is really these particular people, then that can't be generalized and applied to other people. If it were purely ideas that could move people, I think everyone could just read Peter Singer and go vegan, but it doesn't work like that. Sometimes that’s disheartening.
Your essay describing your — at times fraught — relationship with ants is perhaps the most conflicted piece in the series. What has your journey and relationship with ants been like?
I’m very familiar with ants. They were a common sight growing up and I liked observing them. But my relationship with ants changed completely when I moved into my New Haven apartment and I saw ants at home every day. It drove me crazy. I killed so many ants.
This was a hard piece to write. The central question was, “Why don't I feel any remorse about killing ants when I have this belief that it's bad to cause suffering for animals?” I feel this deep sadness when I see dead birds, for example. That inconsistency was something I sought to answer, and I couldn't. I could explain the different feelings that these ants evoked in me; they were not anything I would be proud to feel with any other kind of animal.
In the end, I couldn't square this general abstract admiration I have for ants — how I like seeing them outside and how humans and ants are similar in many ways — with the fact that I could not live with ants in my home. It gave me a little glimpse into how some people might think of farmed animals or wild animals or just pedestrian animals, animals that are small or cause problems or are inconvenient. They're a problem to be dealt with. It was very easy to think that way about ants, so I understand how people could think that for other animals. My hope is that I'm going to live where there are no ants. This third essay goes against a lot of what I say in the first and second essays. They're all true, and I don't know if there's a way to harmonize them neatly.
Are there any other essays still in-progress that will be part of the series? If so, can you share what they’re about?
The last essay starts with my experience cat sitting and how it was not what I expected it to be. I think what surprised me the most is how much the cat had to rely on me for basic things, because I've always thought of cats as these really independent beings. That realization evoked in me pity and contempt because it seemed like the cat couldn't survive on its own. My partner and I are now thinking of adopting cats, and it's a big responsibility. It will also call for a lot of adjustments. The essay is mostly about me grappling with fearing these changes and thinking back to the tender, gentler moments I shared with the cat. It was very trusting, vulnerable, and honest about what it wanted. It’s also about if I feel okay being responsible for a being like that for probably like 20 years. It’s a bit scary, but I think I am.
