Rescue dogs head to UK as S Koreans lose taste for meat
NINE South Korean dogs are heading to the UK for adoption this Christmas as Asia’s fourth largest economy is turning against eating dog meat.
Dermot, Indie, Luna, Millie, Nara, Olive, Robin, Sandie and Tessa belong to a group of 200 golden retrievers, collies, spaniels, Korean jindos and tosas that were recently rescued by the Humane Society International (HSI) charity from a dog-meat farm in Gyeonggi-do.
The rescue was the 13th by HSI in a country where the tradition of eating dog meat is thousands of years old.
An estimated one million dogs are believed to be eaten annually. Younger Koreans, however, are generally opposed to the practice and the number of dogmeat restaurants is in steady decline.
Their views are reflected in modern South Korea’s political and judicial systems, that are progressively cracking down on the dog-meat trade.
In May a new bill was introduced to the National Assembly that would remove the legal basis for the factorystyle mass breeding of dogs. In June a court in Bucheon, a satellite city of Seoul, the capital, convicted the owner of a dog farm for killing animals without proper reason, in a ruling hailed by animal rights activists as a milestone.
The rescue at the Gyeonggi-do farm in October was done in partnership with the owner, who signed up to HSI’s programme to phase out the dog-meat industry by helping farmers move to more profitable and animal-friendly livelihoods. The owner, Mr Lee, 71, will transform his land into a medicinal herb farm, while the dogs he raised will be flown to Canada, the UK, US and Holland. “I’ve wanted to stop dog farming for a while but I didn’t know how to make it happen,” he said.
Wendy Higgins, of HSI, said: “There is certainly momentum building within South Korea for an end to the dog-meat trade, with very vocal animal groups exposing the cruelty, and increasingly politicians also speaking out. We’re seeing progress on a pretty rapid scale. And we see that reflected in our work with dog-meat farmers too, as they are increasingly keen to explore ways to exit the trade due to a combination of dwindling profits and family pressure.”