South Korea has now banned the dog meat trade:
Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 dogs.
After that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison.
“Realistically, even just on my farm, I can’t process the number of dogs I have in that time,” he says. “At this point I’ve invested all of my assets [into the farm] – and yet they are not even taking the dogs.”
By “they”, Chan-woo doesn’t just mean the traders and butchers who, prior to the ban, would buy an average of half a dozen dogs per week.
He’s also referring to the animal rights activists and authorities who in his view, having fought so hard to outlaw the dog meat trade, have no clear plan for what to do with the leftover animals – of which there are close to 500,000, according to government estimates.
“They [the authorities] passed the law without any real plan, and now they’re saying they can’t even take the dogs.”
…A spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Mafra) told the BBC that if farm owners gave up their dogs, local governments would assume ownership and manage them in shelters.
Here is the full BBC story, via Rich Dewey.
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