Then their fur is boiled, ripped or torched off so they can be chopped up, sole and eaten.
It stays a thriving, and mostly shady, business — even yet customarily a minority of South Koreans eat dog, and even yet those numbers are decreasing.
Recent years have seen a arise in pet gripping in South Korea, and along with it a aloft grade of honour afforded to dogs, generally those of a thoroughbred variety.
At a same time, South Korea’s fledgling animal gratification transformation is apropos stronger and some-more active, and banning a eating of dog is during a tip of a agenda.
Still, there are those, inside South Korea and out, who would like to see a sum and evident finish to dog beef consumption.
Among them is In Defense of Animals (IDA), an classification that has been holding a tellurian day of criticism opposite a use for a past 7 years.
This year, IDA has assimilated army with dual South Korean animal gratification groups – Coexistence for Animal Rights on Earth (CARE) and Korean Animal Rights Advocates (KARA), to criticism dog meat consumption.
The 7th annual International Day of Action for South Korean Dogs and Cats is tomorrow — Tuesday, Aug 16 — and is timed to coincide with what is a rise duration of dog expenditure in South Korea, a hottest summer months. Many of those who marketplace and devour dog beef contend it increases vitality, masculine passionate bravery and ubiquitous health — all myths, according to IDA.
At a events, reason concurrently in dozens of cities around a world, activists pass out leaflets and reason signs, mostly outward South Korean Embassies and Consulates.
You can find a full list of a day’s events in America and other countries here.
I met some of South Korea’s animal activists, and visited an outward dog marketplace during a outing to Seoul in 2009 to investigate my book, “DOG, INC.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend.”
South Korea was a initial nation to counterpart a dog — a attainment some contend was finished probable by a easy entrance to dogs from dog farms. Both before and after a birth of Snuppy, a initial dog clone, scientists used plantation dogs both for their eggs and as surrogates in their attempts to counterpart a species.
Given that, we felt a need to visit Moran Market, an open atmosphere concert outward Seoul where cages line a travel for a full city block, and dogs can be purchased in partial or in whole, live or dead, baked or raw, for as small as $100.
Customers ordinarily select a live dog from a cage, during that indicate the dog is pulled out with a knot trustworthy to a stick, dragged into a circuitously room and given a deadly electrical startle with what resembles a cattle prod. It is thrown into a steel vat of hot H2O to alleviate a beef and make a fur easier to remove. From there it is tumbled in a dryer that removes many of a fur. A flame is used to bake off any that remains, and a dog is afterwards butchered to sequence while we wait. About 25 percent of South Korea’s dog beef is sole by Moran Market.
On
my revisit to a market, workers waved me down. They offering me a chair
by a fire, a crater of tea and a cigarette. One grabbed a prolonged
stick, poked it by a bars in a enclosure and jabbed several dogs to
uncover me how sharp-witted they were. The seeking cost was about $150,
yet it eventually forsaken to $100.While a few purebreds were in a mix, roughly all were mutts. Most dog beef in Korea comes from churned breeds that, while identical to a local Jindo multiply in appearance, are mongrels, and are mostly referred to simply as “yellow dogs.” Most of them have been raised on farms, spending many of their lives in cages, or on three-foot chains.
Seeing we was unfeeling in shopping an whole live dog, a merchants offering me half of one – boiled and de-furred, though with a head, tail and paws still intact.
While there is feud over how distant behind dog eating in Korea goes, prolonged stretches of misery and fight finished it some-more popular, and necessary. While many never took adult a practice, or have deserted it, an estimated 500 to 600 restaurants in Seoul alone offer dog, in several forms.
Animal activists told me that the bulk of marketplace dogs come from farms, though that stolen and wandering pets mostly finish adult in a mix, and even dogs sole by reprobate animal shelters.
“There are dogs picked adult as strays off a streets and dogs that were being used to multiply pets though have gotten aged and useless,” pronounced Soyoun Park, boss of CARE.
“The
approach we can heed if it’s a plantation dog or a homeless dog is that
those dogs that are lifted during a plantation won’t demeanour during a
tellurian directly. They don’t wish eye contact. Those who are not
fearful about looking a tellurian in a eye are customarily dogs that
have been lifted in someone’s house.”Dog was private from a menus of many restaurants during a 1988 Seoul Olympics, and in 1991, South Korea upheld a initial animal insurance law, ostensibly forbidding a sale and expenditure of dog meat.
But a government has finished small to make it — scarcely 6,500 stores in a nation still sell dog meat, according to a IDA.
As some some activists in Seoul told me, vigour from outward a country, adult to now, seems to have had small outcome on dwindling dog beef expenditure in South Korea. Any loyal and durability change, they believe, will expected have to come from within.
And as one forked out, Americans — with all our righteous indignation — live in a nation where a series of dogs euthanized during shelters each year is only about a same as a series consumed in Korea.
When it comes to a contentment of dogs as a species, be they American or Korean, there is work to be done. I’m only blissful there are people — in both countries — doing it.
(Photos by John Woestendiek)
Source : asia-e.com
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