Julie Choiby Julie Choi
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Photo courtesy of Yongsan Cats
FOR MORE THAN a month, I was looking for kittens I could not see.
Their mother, Yeontan, was living in a part of Yongsan that was being cleared for redevelopment. She was young, cautious and still returning often enough for us to know that she had given birth somewhere nearby. What we did not know was where. The block held many places that might shelter a small family: a gap beneath a structure, an empty room, a passage behind a wall. As residents moved away and access changed, each possibility became harder to check.
There was no official map that could help us. A redevelopment plan can show property lines, buildings to be removed and future roads. It does not show the route a mother cat takes when she leaves her kittens and the hour she feels safe enough to cross an alley.
A redevelopment plan can mark property lines, but it does not record the routes, shelter and human routines on which a street cat depends. Photo courtesy of YongsanCats.
That information existed, but only in fragments. It was held by people who had watched the block over time. One person knew where Yeontan usually appeared. Another could tell when a familiar cat had missed a meal. Photographs helped us compare markings and sightings. Repeated walks helped us understand which openings were still passable. None of this looked like formal expertise. All of it mattered.
When we finally found Yeontan’s three kittens, they were around one and a half to two months old. We named them Hana, Duri and Sani. All three had eye infections. Yeontan was protective but not aggressive, a mother who was barely past kittenhood herself. Getting the family into care required treatment and a foster place where they could stay together. The search ended, but the work did not.
I think about that month whenever redevelopment is described as though a neighborhood becomes empty in an orderly sequence. It does not. People leave at different times. Shops close. Gates are locked. Fences appear. Construction traffic changes the hours when cats move. A feeding place may remain physically present but become unreachable. An old house may look abandoned while an animal is still using the space beneath it.
The absence of residents is often treated as proof that nothing important remains. For street cats, it can mean that the people who made survival possible have disappeared first.
I run YongsanCats as an independent rescue effort. Much of my work takes place in this gap between the official story of a changing district and the life that continues inside it. A cat does not understand that a home has been acquired, that demolition has been scheduled or that access has become a legal question. The cat understands a route, a smell, a wall that blocks the wind and a person who arrives with food.
When those things disappear, the animal may not simply relocate. Cats are territorial. Some hide more deeply. Some keep returning to the same blocked entrance. Some cross unfamiliar roads in search of a route that no longer connects. A frightened cat may remain inside a restricted site because the danger it knows feels safer than the territory it does not.
This is why local knowledge is not sentimental decoration around rescue. It is infrastructure.
Walls, ledges, feeding places and arrival times form a practical map learned through repeated observation. Photo courtesy of YongsanCats
A regular caregiver can provide the baseline that makes illness visible. She knows whether a cat normally finishes a meal, keeps weight on, walks evenly, or appears at a predictable time. When I need to plan a humane capture, that history helps determine where and when a trap can be placed. It can also reveal whether the cat is nursing, whether another cat depends on the same feeding point or whether a failed attempt will make the animal avoid the area entirely.
The knowledge is practical, but it is fragile. It may live in a phone full of photographs, a short message, a remembered route or the habits of an older resident preparing to move. It is rarely collected before redevelopment begins. By the time a rescuer is called, the person who knew the cat best may already be living somewhere else.
What is lost, then, is not only a physical neighborhood. It is the network of attention that made individual animals legible.
From outside, street cats can appear interchangeable. Once people have watched them for months or years, they are not. One has a folded ear. Another waits until the others finish eating. One appears only after the last shop closes. Another is never seen without a particular companion. These distinctions are how we know who is missing and who needs help. Without them, a count of “several cats” can hide the disappearance of one specific animal.
Redevelopment compresses the time available to act. A stable feeding routine allows observation. A site about to close demands decisions: Which cat is in immediate danger? Is there a nursing mother? Can the cat safely return after sterilisation, or is the territory no longer viable? Is a clinic available? Is there a foster room after discharge? Can the person who brings the cat also give medication?
Each question exposes another kind of work that formal redevelopment does not usually account for. Transport, veterinary care, recovery, foster observation and adoption are treated as private matters even when the public transformation of a neighborhood created the emergency. The cost is financial, but it is also time, space and responsibility. A resident may have to choose between leaving on schedule and continuing to search for an animal she has fed for years. A rescuer may know that a cat should not be returned but have no open foster place.
Trap-neuter-return remains valuable when a cat has a stable territory and continuing care. In a clearance zone, the word “return” requires scrutiny. Returning a cat to the same coordinates is not the same as returning the animal to the same life. If the shelter, caregiver and route have gone, the location has changed even when the pin on a map has not.
Adoption is not a simple answer either. Some street cats adjust quickly indoors; others need long periods of quiet before their behaviour can be understood. A cat’s fear in a trap or clinic does not tell us everything about how that animal will live in a home. Foster care can reveal playfulness, tolerance of other cats and the first small signs of trust, but foster space is finite. Every long recovery affects the next cat we can accept.
These limits make it tempting to frame rescue as a series of individual acts of kindness. Kindness is present, but it is not enough. The work also depends on coordination, records, access and advance notice. A city that wants humane redevelopment should identify animal caregivers before fencing begins, allow time for monitoring and trapping, and support the full path from veterinary treatment to recovery or placement. Sterilisation funding alone cannot solve a case if there is nowhere safe for the cat to go afterwards.
The public conversation about redevelopment often divides people into those who support change and those who resist it. Street-cat care does not fit comfortably into that argument. The question is not whether a neighborhood can ever change. It is whether the beings who cannot read the notice, attend the meeting or claim compensation are considered before the machinery arrives.
Yeontan’s kittens recovered in foster care. As they became healthier, their personalities separated from the emergency that had defined them. Duri was affectionate and adventurous. Hana became playful and confident. Sani was more careful, but wanted to sleep close once she trusted someone. Their mother watched them and slowly learned from their ease around people.
That part of the story matters because redevelopment first made them difficult to see. Rescue made them individual again.
The knowledge that found them was not held by one institution. It moved between people: a sighting, a photograph, a remembered path, another early walk through the block. This is often how street-cat rescue works in Seoul. It relies on residents and caregivers whose observations are rarely recognised as a form of civic knowledge, even when those observations are the only record of who is still living inside a place marked for erasure.
By the time a neighborhood disappears physically, much of that knowledge may already be gone. The people who carried it have moved. The walls used as landmarks have fallen. A new building will eventually make the site look complete again.
But completion is not the same as continuity.
Before a fence closes, someone should ask who still returns, who is watching and what they know. The answers will not stop a city from changing. They can stop that change from becoming an avoidable emergency for animals whose lives were part of the neighborhood, even if they never appeared on its plans.