Life is as dear to the mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and to die, so do other creatures. (His Holiness The Dalai Lama)

FARM IN YONGIN

We drive an hour from Seoul, where we come upon a very small dog farm of around 10-15 dogs, with many empty cages, and the farmer away from the grounds; we quickly enter to take photos and stay approximately ten minutes. We see the dogs.  An imperceptible shiver runs though me. The images burn into my eyes in this bleak prison, hidden from everything. The anxious mother and her tiny, white newborn pups, the three small Chihuahua mixes who beg me, their eyes filled with luminous pain, to take them out of this inferno of the condemned. They whimper softly. In their dirty cages are nauseatingly filthy bowls filled with leftover human food from restaurants, schools, hospitals, among other places, of garbage: salty, rotten kimchi, spicy hot pepper paste, chili soup, fish bones, and other discarded rubbish.  In the appallingly unsanitary world of breeding farms, the dogs eat this waste, which of course carries human saliva, and they often become carriers of disease to those who eat them.

According to a groundbreaking television program that aired in South Korea, in 2011, called “South Korea’s Dangerous Health Food—Inconvenient Truth About Dog Meat,” an undercover team of reporters interviewed a Dr. Oh, who said that eating dog meat could be hazardous to your health. “These dogs are not fed standard diet appropriate for dogs.  Therefore, poisonous substances from these dogs can be contagious to humans. And when these chemicals accumulated in our body, it can cause very serious health problems.  Dog meat that is contaminated with germs such as Salmonella is not safe even when you boil or steam it because the germ can survive and cause diseases to humans.”

As we make our way through this foul swamp, what catches our attention is an enclosed area for killing and preparing the meat, equipped with the ubiquitous rotating drum for fur removal, knives, bloody gloves, and killing implements for hanging and electrocution.  At the farms, dogs are either hanged or electrocuted or often beaten to death. According to So-Yeon Park, of Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth (CARE), “Death is deliberately slow due to the belief that torture improves the taste and ‘health’ benefits of the meat. The typical method of slaughter is electrocution, which takes from 30 seconds to 3 minutes until the dog dies, beatings before and during slaughter, being burned with a blowtorch, boiled alive, and bled out. The ‘old-fashioned’ way involves hanging taking up to seven minutes.” 
After electrocution, when they may be conscious, they are thrown into boiling water, dying an agonizing death and cooking the skin slightly. And then they are bled out, sometimes when hanging, where cuts are made to an artery or organ to eliminate any unwanted gamey odor. Fresh flesh has a pungent smell when there is any remaining blood. Because customers generally prefer their meat without blood, the killing process more often than not involves torture to cause more injuries, not allowing the dog to bleed out more easily but adhering to the prevailing myth that the greater the terror experienced the tastier and more tender the meat. Customers at markets will often ask for their dog to be beaten, ensuring there is no blood, and allowing for torture for the price of a tasty meal. The majority of big dogs are hanged and smaller dogs are very often boiled alive for soup. Dogs are also hanged and beaten to death by individuals who do their own killing, which is a common occurrence in the countryside. After the slaughtering, there is the removal of fur, which is where the dog is dumped into a rotating drum, which whirls and churns madly like a dryer. There are always strands of hair remaining in the spinning pot.  And finally, after fur removal, a blowtorch is used to scorch the skin on a raised grill, tenderizing the meat.

Dogs who are not sold, the leftovers, often go to pet shops, pet auctions, other farms, or restaurants. Purebred dogs, and old and sick dogs, i.e., “less merchantable quality” dogs from purebred breeding farms are sent to the slaughterhouse for meat. Any dog—big, small, mixed, and purebred—are not only all the same, deconstructing the idea that there are dogs for meat and dogs for companions, but also are everywhere up for grabs.

It appears that the South Korean government benefits from dog farms, with all of the leftovers that would normally be thrown away and disposed of properly are instead donated to the dog meat industry and fed to dogs for free. The government, therefore, doesn’t have to get rid of the waste, saving money.

We are plunged in despair leaving these dogs to await their deaths.