This is translation of Korea Animal Rights Advocates (KARA)’s post.
In an era when 10 million dogs are considered companion animals, more than one million are being slaughtered every year at 3,000 of the “world’s only meat dog farms.” It would not be an exaggeration to call these meat dog farms “companion animal slaughterhouses.”
These statistics, however, may be low and the breeding environment and slaughtering process of dogs is unregulated. While dog meat consumption still exists in countries like China and Vietnam, South Korea is the only country with farms that breed dogs continually, and where large farms housing more than 1,000 dogs are in operation for the purpose of human consumption. These animals are confined their entire lives to tiny steel raised wire cages before they are slaughtered and eaten.
To gain an understanding of the meat dog farms that operate in the darkness of no governmental regulation, Representative Lee Jeong-Mi of the Justice Party and animal rights group Korea Animal Rights Advocates (KARA; Im Soon-Lye, director) requested data from the Ministry of Environment on dog farms that are required to submit reports for the livestock manure treatment facility and conducted analysis.
Based on this data, KARA conducted field investigations in sample areas including Gyeonggi-do Gimpo and Yeoju, Gangwon-do Wonju, Gyeongsangbuk-do Gimcheon for 10 months beginning August 2016 and inspected the state of the breeding conditions and livestock manure treatment status of these dog farms.
As a result, it was confirmed that there are at least 2,862 dog farms in South Korea that are over 60 square meters and therefore are required to file livestock manure treatment facility reports. At least 781,740 dogs were being bred on these dog farms, with an average of 273 dogs per farm.
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