Gov’t launches inspection of private animal shelters

The government has started inspecting private animal protection centers amid the controversy over a local animal shelter’s alleged euthanasia of rescued animals.

Since December, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has been inspecting private animal shelters, which is scheduled to be carried out through March.

There are 293 animal protection centers that are supervised by local governments. Forty of them are in direct governmental control and the remaining 253 are private ones to which the governments outsourced.

However, there are many more private animal shelters without the municipalities’ surveillance, and the ministry is unaware of the total number. An animal activist group’s report estimated the number at around 150 nationwide.

“There is not even a government definition of what a private animal protection center is,” said an official from an animal activist group, KARA.

Such private shelters operate under a legal loophole. “Those facilities are not subject to regulations under the Animal Protection Law,” a ministry official said.

The ministry plans to grasp the situation of these facilities, such as how many centers are in operation and how animals are treated there. It also plans to meet and gather opinions from shelter operators in February, before it releases a mid-term report on their progress the same month.

Most private animal shelters are operated by donations. However, only a handful of popular shelters receive sufficient donations to manage the organizations and shelters, and many smaller ones are suspected of being underfunded and understaffed.

According to the ministry’s 2017 data, there were 102,593 reports on lost or abandoned animals, and 20.2 percent of them were euthanized because of illness or some other causes designated by the law on mercy killing. This number was from the 293 protection centers supervised by local governments, not including data from private facilities.

Last week, the animal protection issue emerged after a CARE employee blew the whistle that the group leader Park ordered the euthanasia of some 250 animals between 2015 and last year due to a lack of space at their shelters.