Three arrests and altercations with police resulted from hundreds of South Korean dog meat producers taking to the streets of Seoul on Thursday to express their opposition to a proposed ban on their means of subsistence, organisers informed the media on Friday.
It was supposedly the idea of several farmers to bring dogs in cages and release them in front of the presidential office. When police noticed that the demonstrators’ trucks had cages hidden behind blankets, they erected barricades to stop them from dumping their cargo on an unwary public.
Social media videos feature farmers protesting the prohibition on dog meat by singing, yelling, and delivering speeches while wearing similar red vests. In other videos, they can be seen yelling at police officers wearing yellow jackets and attempting to break through a barricade made of people.
First Lady Kim Keon Hee’s “pet” cause, the prohibition, will completely phase out the industry by 2027. It promises to provide vocational training to meat farmers so they can move to another industry and compensate them for losing their business.
Head of a trade association for dog meat farmers and rally organiser Ju Yeongbong told Reuters that the government had totally cut them out of the bill’s deliberations. He added that farmers wanted more time to wind down their activities and that the small amount of compensation offered was insufficient to make up for the loss of their livelihoods and that the offer of training was meaningless. Farmers wanted direct pay for giving up their animals.
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According to Ju, “the majority of dog meat industry workers are in their 60s and 70s, which means they are looking for retirement rather than new jobs.” “The practise of eating dog meat will disappear in the next 15 to 20 years anyway, since few young Koreans do.”
He refuted the idea that eating dogs is barbarous, pointing out that “dogs have been eaten at some point in all countries that have a tradition of animal husbandry, and there are still countries where it is done.”
Rather, he declared, “to rob people of their right to eat is a violent act of barbarism.”
In South Korea, the popularity of dog meat has decreased, particularly among younger people. In a Gallup poll from 2022, only 8% of participants indicated they had eaten it in the year prior, down from 27% in 2015, and 64% stated they were against the practise.
Government data quoted by Reuters indicates that there are still 1,150 farms where dogs are raised for food, 34 slaughterhouses, 219 meat distribution organisations, and 1,600 restaurants that serve dog meat.
Ju’s group put up tables in July to prepare and consume dog meat in public while serving it to onlookers as a protest against animal rights activists’ attempts to outlaw the feeding of dogs.
