Surprise! Dog Meat Popular in North Korea
by Richardson ~ February 4th, 2007. Filed under: Asides.Via AFP: “While dogmeat restaurants are taking a lower profile in South Korea, the reverse is true in the North Korean capital, according to Chosun Shinbo… one of the restaurants has developed a new set menu-consisting of canine intestines and other organs, dogmeat soup and a bowl of steamed millet. “Dangogi-jang is one of the most favourite cuisines among the Korean people,” said the newspaper… Official media touts its nutritional properties.” The paper omits that rat meat is also a popular dish in the DPRK.
February 4th, 2007 at 2:55 am
[…] maybe North Korea isn’t such a shitty place after […]
April 8th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Hi, I am a Korean student, 15 years old, and I want to explain some things about Korea’s dog eating culture because I think that there are a lot of prejudices remain in the United States and other western countries.
I read many opinions that Americans and British wrote in their homepage. Many of those thought that Korea’s dog-eating culture is such an animal-abuse, and it must be stopped. However, I think that most of these opinions are based on the common prejudices surrounding the Korean culture.
You have to understand the historical background of Korea’s dog-eating culture. In the western countries, dogs had been commonly served the role of protecting sheep and other domestic animals. Because dog’s role was to protect animals, western people have never thought of raising and eating dogs as a food, and therefore dogs had become men’s best friend. However, you have to understand that things are different in Korea. In Korea, cows and other domestic animals were commonly used as a farming tool, and it was not easy to eat them as a food. Also, the price of meat was very expensive. Because of these reasons, dog was the common source to supply protein to Koreans.
Even though it’s hard to understand Korea’s dog-eating culture because not many exchange was there between western countries and Korea before 20th century, but I think that western countries have to understand the Korean culture at the cultural relativity’s point.
April 8th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Hello Jang Sung Hoon. You are certainly correct that there are many prejudices to eating dog (and horse, cat, etc.) in the West. For some that is about the consumption of the meat and the “man’s best friend” argument.
However, charges of animal abuse and what you term, “common prejudices surrounding the Korean culture” are two different things.
It is not necessary to understand the “historical background” of beating, strangling, burning, and shocking a dog to death because of a backward belief that in so doing various hormones will be released into the meat that will benefit a mans flagging equipment, or keep one cool in the hot days of summer.
What many Koreans need to understand is that there are generally two different groups of Westerners who think eating dog is wrong; a) those that protest on the grounds of a dog is “man’s best friend, and b) those that think it is wrong to torture a dog to death.
I find myself in both groups, though much more strongly in the anti-torture group.
So please do not attempt to couch this as a misunderstanding in realm of “cultural relativity,” it is not.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Jang Sung Hoon, if eating dog meat is part of Korean culture
why is it offically illegal here?
April 9th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Ugh. I am not going to even go there… Maybe I will later if I can muster the energy.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:53 am
I’ve been to the Moran Market and seen for my own eyes what is going on. The animals there are being brutally tortured. Perhaps you should make a trip there one Saturday afternoon and see for yourself. If not, then you can check out this link and see the photos.
http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/dog.html
April 9th, 2007 at 8:45 am
I love it when some well-intentioned ethnic Korean wanders in to give us ignorant Westerners a cultural tip.
Dog, rat, pork, chicken, beef… there are nutritional differences among the different types of meat, depending on the species, its diet, and how it was treated during its life and prior to being slaughtered. Mistreated animals get their revenge by yielding meat of poor quality. This has been proven by agricultural researchers at Purdue University. Meat from stressed animals is rendered inferior by a pH that is either too high or too low according to the kind of stress - neglect versus mistreatment. Giving animals plenty of sunshine, naturally appropriate food (grass, not grain cocktails), and slaughtering them humanely rewards us with meat that is nutritionally rich and delicious.
Koreans can have their tenderized dogmeat. I’ll stick with pasture-raised beef, chicken, and pork, thanks.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Well, this ethnic Korean finds the dog meat eating practices in Korea repulsive on both grounds, i.e. brutal treatment prior to slaughter and the violation of the special nature (or social contract) between man and dog.
I might also add that cat tonics and drinks are consumed in Korea, a practice I find strange and reprehensible due to the first reason.
When I was growing up in Korea, these practices were more overt in the public eye. They are now more “beneath the surface,” but not by much.
April 9th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I do think cat tonics are under the radar for many Koreans. On another blog, I argued with a couple of young Korean high school students who refused to believe that Koreans used cats to make medicine. They disputed my testimony about seeing live cats for sale in a stall with butchering equipment at Kyongdong Medicinal Market near Korea University. They claimed to have asked their classmates, who all shrugged and said they had never heard of such a thing.
I suspect the young generation will find cat soup unpalatable and even dogmeat consumption may decline now that so many young Koreans have grown up with dogs as pets.
I just wish my fellow Americans would wake up to the evils of factory farms. You want cheap meat, dairy, and produce? Well, you get what you pay for - nutritionally poor foodstuffs and a growing population of undocumented workers and their families.
April 9th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
If tiger schlongs are on the menu, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t believe that cat is there as well.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Sadly, not true. There are restaurants that advertise cat drinks and such right on the window. Maybe not in Apgoojungdong, but they’re there.
Stop… right there. You’re arguing with kids who think where they live is at the center of the universe.
In all seriousness, I find most young Korean kids nowadays very, very sheltered and in some ways far more naive than those from my generation or older.
I sometimes claim, only half in jest, that mine was the last generation to grow up with widespread poverty in South Korea. Sometimes prosperity fosters credulity, something I see in the suburbs of America everyday. But I digress.
April 9th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
“Sadly, not true. There are restaurants that advertise cat drinks and such right on the window. Maybe not in Apgoojungdong, but they’re there.”
What is the name of cat tonic in Korean? I don’t recall seeing anything cat-sounding advertised in restaurant windows like all the different names of dogmeat dishes.
I know that cat medicine exists, but I don’t think its consumption is widespread among younger middle-class Koreans. Observant residents in Korea will notice that produce vendors and restaurant owners sometimes keep a kitten tied up on the premises. After a few weeks, kitty disappears. Even we dumb waeguks could figure out what was going on, so any Korean with two eyes ought to be aware that cats are used for human consumption. Oh, yeah, and then there are men riding bicycles with baskets in back around residential neighborhoods calling “goyangi.”
April 9th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
From wikipedia:
“Cats are sometimes boiled and made into a tonic as a folk remedy for neuralgia and arthritis in Korea, though the meat by itself is customarily not eaten”
April 10th, 2007 at 1:51 am
Goyangyi Soju.
April 10th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Personally, I don’t see anything uniquely evil about eating dogs. Farm kids keep sheep, chickens, goats, and all kinds of delicious creatures as pets. I do see something wrong with eating your friends regardless of phylum or genus. I also see something wrong with killing cows, chickens, and goats in unncessarily cruel and painful ways. But on the other hand, there are plenty of mean junkyard dogs in this word that I don’t elevate to a special moral plane, because dogs like those are nobody’s friends. Most of the eating dogs I’ve seen in Korea seem to belong in that category. This says nothing of the tiny cages they’re kept in, however.
To me, if it’s (a) not human, (b) not your trusting pet, (c) killed humanely, and (d) good broiled with a wild rice stuffing and served in a nice cream sauce, I’m not going to protest.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Clearly inhumane treatment of dogs and cats prior to slaughter in Korea has been documented repeatedly. On that ground alone, the Korean practice is objectionable.
Unlike, Joshua, however, I elevate the relationship between man and dog to a level not comparable to the likes of sheeps and chicken that are expressly reared as food.
Man and dog have formed a special symbiotic relationship for perhaps about 100,000 years. Call it a Grand Bargain in nature or a special Social Contract — dogs have agreed to serve as our companions, scouts, hunters, watchmen, guardians, transporters, babysitters, aids for the blind and other handicapped people, drug detectors, police officers, rescuers… I can go on.
In return, we humans have agreed to share our food and shelter with them and treat them nicely as if they were our family members.
I do not believe this kind of bond exists with other species. I have never seen a sheep or a chicken rush to defend my family members under assault as our dogs have done. Other animals generally run for their lives when there is trouble.
Dogs will happily rush to their deaths in an effort to defend their family — their pack — because they have a special bond with us, a bond that should not be violated by subjecting them to cruelty and eating them like cattle.