By Borami Seo
The author is director of government affairs at Humane Society International/Korea.
The inexorable shift in public attitudes concerning the dog meat industry and its cruelty shows just how far we have come in Korea when it comes to animal protection concerns. A nationwide opinion survey by Nielsen shows that 87.5% of Korean respondents have either never eaten dog meat or don’t intend to do so in the future, while 56% responded that they support a ban. Moreover, according to 2022 statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, 25.4% of Korean households have companion animals. This growth in living with companion animals such as dogs and cats has made a difference on the dog meat issue and many others. As more Koreans develop bonds of affection and care for animals in our homes, we frequently begin to think about the welfare and needs of other kinds of animals. The physical and mental suffering endured by hundreds of thousands of dogs languishing on dog meat farms is far harder to ignore when we have a beloved dog at home teaching us every day that all dogs have feelings and deserve our compassion.
In our constructive approach to ending the dog meat industry, HSI/Korea’s Models for Change program has chosen dialogue instead of demonization. First and foremost, we’ve built collaborative relationships with dog meat farmers to help them transition to other pursuits, including growing vegetables or water delivery, and to demonstrate the feasibility of phasing out the practice without conflict.
The political sector has also been paying attention. In April, First Lady Kim Keon Hee expressed her support for a ban on dog meat, and representatives from the Democratic Party of Korea and the People Power Party have committed to work for the passage of bills that will end the dog meat industry. We need the ban to codify the social consensus that the dog meat industry is out of step with evolving values on our proper relationship with nonhuman animals.
When a ban on the dog meat industry comes about—as I hope it will—it will be a great achievement. But many other animal welfare challenges will still remain because we have a lot of work ahead of us when it comes to protecting other animals who are suffering in captivity, entertainment, animal testing laboratories, intensive confinement agriculture, the fur trade, and other contexts.
Who would have thought, for example, that there are still elephants used in cruel and outdated animal acts for human entertainment on Jeju Island? Or that there are captive cetaceans still languishing in concrete tanks at Geoje Sea World? There’s no room in Korean tourism or Korean life for this kind of archaic and shabby treatment of animals.
And is it possible that even after an agreement between the bear farm industry and the government on bringing an end to bear farming, there are still 308 moon bears crammed into cages, waiting for final rescue and a chance to live out their lives in sanctuaries? These bears are the last survivors of Korea’s bear bile farming industry. They deserve better, and they deserve it now.
When it comes to the use of animals in research, testing, and education, there is growing agreement about the need to replace their use, and we have the technology to do so in the form of established and emerging non-animal methods that better simulate human biological responses. But the numbers are going in the wrong direction, reaching a record high number of 4.88 million in 2021. We shouldn’t be complacent about that, and we should adopt a strategy to reverse this disturbing trend.
Finally, there is factory farming, the intensive confinement of animals raised for food. Animal agriculture is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, so all global citizens and policymakers—including in Korea—should heed the words of climate scientists and actively reduce production and consumption of factory-farmed animals, acknowledging the advantages of a more plant-based diet for animal welfare, human health, and natural resources.
There is some room for optimism about the future of animal welfare in Korea. In 2021, for example, the Civil Act amendment bill acknowledged that ‘animals are not objects’. Once passed, it will help in cases advanced to provide legal protection for a wider range of animal species.
2021 was also the year in which the Ministry of Environment introduced its 2030 Chemical Safety and Animal Welfare vision to reduce current reliance on the use of animals for testing. HSI/Korea has been cooperating with scientific and government interest holders to promote the use of state-of-the-art technologies to replace animal tests. In 2022, the Act on the Vitalization of Development, Dissemination, and Use of Alternatives to Animal Testing Methods was introduced to increase collaborative investment in new approaches.
We’ve also seen dozens of legislative proposals introduced at the national level in recent years on a range of concerns. Not too many of them have successfully passed, but they have all stirred debate and reflection on the moral duties we have toward animals and the opportunities we have to make their lives better. Is Korea ready to legally recognize animals as sentient beings? We are certainly stepping closer, and Korea’s readiness to consign the brutal dog meat industry to our history books will be a test of our resolve. Doing better for animals is the right thing to do, and it’s the right thing for Korea.
