Three-year dog meat sales ban phase-in rewards a 35-year campaign that built an increasingly strong South Korean animal advocacy sector
SEOUL, South Korea––The 300-seat South Korean parliament on January 9, 2024 banned breeding and killing dogs for human consumption by a vote of 298-0 with two abstentions, effective on January 1, 2027.
Violators may be fined up to 30 million won, roughly equivalent to $23,000 in U.S. dollars.
The bill to ban the dog meat industry was endorsed in November 2023 by both of the biggest South Korean political parties, by South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, and by his wife, first lady Kim Keon Hee.
“Dog meat consumption should come to an end” said First Lady
Attending an animal advocacy event in August 2023, Kim Keon Hee reportedly said “Dog meat consumption should come to an end, in an era when humans and pets coexist as friends.”
Favorable public response to Kim Keon Hee’s remark appears to have set progress toward passing the dog meat industry ban in motion.
(See South Korean government pledges dog-eating will be banned by 2027.)
Cat meat consumption, much less common in South Korea than dog-eating, is apparently not mentioned in the legislation passed on January 9, 2024, but laws and regulations pertaining to dogs in South Korea usually incorporate cats by inference.
Dog meat consumption already fast falling
Dog meat consumption in South Korea has plummeted over the past 10 years, from about 3,500 “farms” supplying circa 3,000 “restaurants” a decade ago to 1,150 “farms” supplying 1,600 “restaurants,” according to 2022 South Korean agriculture department data.
Most South Korean dog meat “farms” are not farms specializing in raising dogs, though there are some that do, but rather are farms producing poultry, pigs, cattle, or crops, where a few dogs are raised on the side. Many dog meat “farms” are just the homes of farm workers with kennels in small yards.
Dog meat is consumed in South Korea almost exclusively by older men, usually in association with vices including gambling, alcohol consumption, and prostitution.
Dog meat has never been commonly sold in supermarkets, consumed in homes, or consumed by women.
What Kitty Block had to do with it
Leaders of South Korean and international animal advocacy organizations lost little time in proclaiming victory after the passage of the dog meat industry ban, including Humane Society of the U.S. [HSUS] president Kitty Block.
Block did, in fairness, make helping South Korean animal advocates to end the dog meat trade a personal priority after becoming vice president of the Humane Society of the U.S. subsidiary Humane Society International [HSI] in 2007.
As Humane Society of the U.S. president since early 2018, Block stepped up her efforts, but even in 2007 HSUS/HSI was a late-comer to a campaign that had already involved practically every international animal advocacy organization with a presence in Asia, including the India-based Blue Cross of India, People for Animals, and the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations, the Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation, and many other groups headquartered in Europe and the United States.
(Facebook photo)
What Brian Davies had to do with it
Global pressure against dog-eating in South Korea began with International Fund for Animal Welfare [IFAW] founder Brian Davies in 1978.
(See International animal advocacy influencer Brian Davies dies at 87.)
Davies’ first campaigns against dog-eating, centered on fundraising and urging activists to write letters of protest to the South Korean government, brought unkept promises that led Davies to distribute premature “victory” announcements in both 1978 and 1980.
In 1983 Brian Davies connected with Sunnan Kum, 54, a Daegu druggist who had founded an organization called Koreans for Animal Protection two years earlier.
Brian Davies and Sunnan Kum together won further promises from the South Korean government and made more premature “victory” announcements in 1984 and 1986.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Rise of South Korean activism
Brian Davies in 1987 hired Sunnan Kum’s younger sister Kyenan, an artist who lived in Oakland, California, to lobby for IFAW, and helped Kyenan Kum to found a U.S. supporting charity, International Aid for Korean Animals [IAKA].
IAKA later worked in a short-lived partnership with In Defense of Animals.
More unfulfilled promises and premature “victory” announcements followed in 1988.
Then-Korean president Roh Tae Woo reportedly realized the revulsion of the western world at dog-and-cat-eating, and the need to really do something about it, after IFAW supporters picketed Buckingham Palace in late 1989 as Roh dined with Queen Elizabeth II.
(Beth Clifton collage)
18 years to first prosecution
But another 18 months passed before the Korean Animal Protection Law was approved on May 7, 1991. At that, the law was not enforced against the dog meat trade until June 2018.
(See South Korean court rules that killing dogs for meat is illegal.)
As the IFAW campaign to secure the law progressed, Brian Davies himself offered statistics which, if accurate, suggested that South Korean dog-and-cat eating had actually increased from one million dogs and cats eaten per year as of 1988 to more than two million in 1991, in apparent direct rebuke of tactics focused on collectively shaming the nation.
(Network For Animals photo)
“We knew the law wouldn’t save dogs & cats overnight”
By 1994, Brian Davies acknowledged in IFAW appeals that the hard-won Korean Animal Protection Law was not being enforced.
“We knew it wouldn’t save cats and dogs overnight,” Davies wrote, “but it was a great first step, because like our laws here in the U.S., it says abusing animals is a crime.”
Early attempts to document the cruelty of the South Korean dog meat trade with photographs and video of the Moran Market near Seoul, the largest dog meat sales venue, were repeatedly disrupted by violent responses from dog meat dealers, ignored by police.
What ANIMALS 24-7 had to do with it
On May 19, 2001, however, ANIMALS 24-7 blocked for three photographers during a two-hour visit to the Moran Market, taking repeated pushes, kicks, and punches without responding with anything that could be construed as violence, but always keeping the dog meat vendors from getting close to the cameras.
When the dog meat vendors appealed for help to the vendors and customers elsewhere in the open-air marketplace, one after another turned his or her back, refusing to become involved.
Police standing by also refused to intervene on behalf of the dog meat vendors.
ANIMALS 24-7 then assembled the photos collected by the photographers into a mosaic which for the first time documented the entire facility, enabling an accurate estimate of the amount of traffic and number of animals bought and sold there.
This was followed by several days of additional observation of the dog meat trade in the cities of Seoul and Daigu,
(Merritt Clifton collage)
“Empower local grassroots advocates”
ANIMALS 24-7 advised, in a report emailed on May 20, 2001 to every organization involved in anti-dog meat campaigning, that rather than proclaiming boycotts and passing petitions, that outside groups should take a low profile and instead concentrate on aiding and empowering grassroots animal advocacy within South Korea.
The non-response of the other buyers and sellers to the Moran Market dog meat vendors’ calls for help had amply demonstrated that the dog dealing goondas had few friends, even on turf that they themselves owned.
“The average Korean neither participates in dog-and-cat-eating,” ANIMALS 24-7 reported then, “nor has any idea what goes on in the dog-and-cat markets,” which were in out-of-the-way places that ordinary shoppers rarely if ever visited.
Why boycotts failed
“All the average Korean seems to know about dog-and-cat-eating, besides that it occurs,” ANIMALS 24-7 continued, “is that externally directed campaigns have for 15 years called for economic and cultural boycotts of anything and everything Korean because of alleged atrocities that most Koreans have no more contact with than average Americans have with fur trapping.
“Thus it is easy for defenders of the dog and cat meat industries to tell Koreans that the boycotts are based on racist innuendo, promoted to protect European and American industry from economic competition, and that the Koreans who support the boycotts are traitors.”
Changing the guard
During the next several years the Korean Animal Protection Society and International Aid for Korean Animals imploded and collapsed as the Kum sisters aged.
A constellation of new indigenous South Korean animal advocacy organizations, however, emerged to close even the Moran Market by 2016.
(See Largest dog and cat meat market in South Korea set to close by May.)
A Bucheon city court judge in 2018 upheld supposed anti-dog meat language in the Korean Animal Protection Act which had been on the books since 1991, but had never before been successfully prosecuted. Not specifically mentioning dogs or dog meat, the 1991 law actually prohibited only the sale of “unsightly foods.”
(See South Korean court rules that killing dogs for meat is illegal, and Police respond––slowly––to complaints about dog slaughter in South Korea.)
Progress on multiple fronts
The “unsightly foods” legislation had been passed largely to placate American and European campaigners who had threatened to organize a boycott of the 1988 Olympic Games, hosted by South Korea.
The passage of the South Korean law prohibiting the dog meat trade came less than a month after the South Korean Ministry of Oceans & Fisheries on December 14, 2023 announced that, “Marine mammals are now prohibited from being used for exhibition purposes as well as programs that involve riding or feeding marine mammals,” effective immediately.
(See Belugas left behind after South Korea bans whale & dolphin captures.)
But there have been two much more subtle recent indications of how much has changed for animals in South Korea.
Problems at cat shelters & with cat food, but they exist now
The Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs of South Korea during 2023 investigated and responded to the reported deaths of “many cats in animal shelters in Seoul,” which proved to be from the high pathogenic avian influenza H5N1.
The cats were infected by cat food containing poultry meat which had not been properly cooked before canning.
Twenty years earlier there were no cat shelters in Seoul, and there was no South Korean cat food manufacturing industry, either––not that it is a big industry now.
“The product in question is mostly sold online. 3,200 cans were bought by 212 people nationwide, including 70 in Seoul, 67 in Gyeonggi, and 13 in Gyeongbuk,” reported the Yonhap News Agency.
Farmed animal culls continue
On December 4, 2023, the Yonhap News Agency mentioned that more than 20,000 ducks had been culled on a farm in the southwestern county of Goheung the previous day, consistent with previous South Korean practice, and U.S. and European practice too, in response to outbreaks of infectious disease among farmed animals.
South Korea, unlike the U.S. and most European nations, has historically been resistant to the use of vaccination to prevent disease outbreaks among farmed animals.
But vaccination takes hold
But in response to just 101 cases of lumpy skin disease, the Korea Times reported on November 17, 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs had eleven days earlier “completed the inoculation of all 4.05 million cattle in the country.”
South Korea previously used vaccination to quell foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in 2010 and 2011, under pressure from animal advocates after killing more than 1.7 million pigs, cattle, and dogs raised for meat on some of the same farms by methods including live burial.
That practice led to water taps spitting blood on New Year’s Day 2011 in Paju, Gyonggi Province, reported Park Si-soo of Korea Times.
The South Korean government tried to suppress awareness of what had happened, but an organization called Korea Animal Rights Advocates [KARA], also instrumental in passing the legislation prohibiting the dog meat industry, made the incident known nationwide.
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What will happen to the dogs raised for food which can no longer be sold for food? Note that I strongly oppose eating dogs and cats but recognize feeding large numbers of dogs is expensive.
Very few dogs are bred for meat in any of the nations where dog-eating remains common. Factory-farming dogs for human consumption was attempted in southern China circa 20 years ago, but the economics of raising dogs to slaughter weight, unlike the economics of raising pigs, poultry, and cattle, are not favorable.
Historically dog-eating has occurred chiefly in nations lacking access to spay/neuter, lacking humane societies, and lacking governmentally funded animal control agencies, where dog-catchers are expected to make a living by selling the dogs they capture. In the U.S. during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, before governmentally funded animal control became a near-universal public service, dog-catchers sold dogs primarily for laboratory use. In other parts of the world, where there was/is little laboratory demand, stray dogs and abandoned litters were, and are, either sold directly for meat, or sold to dog meat farmers, who raise them to slaughter weight and then sell them for meat.
With due respect to decades of activist effort to ban the dog meat trade, increasing access to affordable spay/neuter surgery has probably accomplished more, as is especially evident from the work of the Soi Dog Foundation throughout continental Southeast Asia, the Bali Animal Welfare Association in Bali, Indonesia, and many other smaller s/n projects.
Hopefully, this won’t be another prematurely-celebrated victory. It makes perfect sense that advocacy groups within that country would and should be the ones who can most effectively help bring about change, as they’re familiar with the nuances and culture of their homeland; but it helps that they’re assisted by some of our larger international organizations. Let’s hope the progress continues in S. Korea – and in every other country that engages in this practice.
VERY grateful for this; may cats benefit from it, and may it take hold in the hearts and minds of the people of Korea.
Ignorance is not callousness. No one knows, until they know. We, too, committed, and still commit, many egregious atrocities against members of other species, both in callousness and in ignorance.
We ALL have a long way to go.
Sharing with gratitude and hope.