South Korean farmers faced with their traditional system of animal agriculture being phased out by 2027 are calling for a longer grace period, in addition to direct financial compensation, as reported by ABC News on January 9.
One farmer was quoted as saying:
..they’re infringing upon freedom of occupational option. We can’t just sit idly.
A former farming association secretary attending a rally was quoted by the ABC as saying:
…industry workers are in their 60s and 70s, which means they are seeking retirement, not new occupations.
Some farmers quoted by ABC News admitted that:
…their businesses will naturally disappear when older people, their main customers, die.
These are South Korean farmers, such as Ju Yeongbong, a former secretary general of a farmers’ association, and Son Won Hak, a farmer and leader of a farmers’ association.
“We do recognise that far more people do not eat dog meat compared to those who do. We do know the market is decreasing… but still, it’s our right to run a business,” said Joo Yeong-bong, an experienced dog farmer and the president of the Korean Association of Edible Dog.
Joo said: “…but still, it’s our right to run a business…”
Is it really a right to run such a business, though?
South Korea’s parliament has endorsed landmark legislation outlawing the country’s dwindling dog meat industry, as public calls for the ban have grown sharply amid animal rights campaigns and worries about the country’s international image.
Some angry dog farmers said they plan to file a constitutional appeal and launch rallies in protest, suggesting that heated debate would continue.
ABC News, January 9 2024
The ABC News article goes on to say that:
Dog meat consumption, a centuries-old practice on the Korean Peninsula, is neither explicitly banned nor legalised in South Korea.
Recent surveys show more people want its ban and a majority of South Koreans don’t eat dog meat any longer.
But the surveys also indicated one in every three South Koreans still oppose the ban even though they don’t eat dog meat.
On Tuesday, the National Assembly passed the bill by a 208-0 vote.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government supports the ban, so the subsequent steps to make it law are considered formality.
The bill would make the slaughtering, breeding, trade and sale of dog meat for human consumption illegal from 2027, and punish such acts with two to three years in prison.
But it doesn’t stipulate penalties for eating dog meat.
So, while this is obviusly positive news for anyone who thinks dogs should not be consumed by humans, can we now expect a growing black market in dog meat to emerge in South Korea, just as there is a Moon Bear bile black market in Vietnam, now that the bear bile industry is being dismantled there, in some cases willingly, by former bear bile farmers?
In 2019, the Humane Society International was quoted as estimating that “…nearly 30 million dogs are killed just across Asia every year for human consumption”. A dog is slaughtered every second, somewhere in Asia, e.g. Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines. (SBS News)
Many people in Western countries are likely to be horrified to learn that dogs are consumed for food in South Korea and elsewhere, in addition to being used to create leather goods in some places, such as China, as shown in this undercover investigation.
But can you just imagine what would happen if the Australian government not only decided to phase out the caged hen system in 2036, and live sheep export in a few years’ time (fulfilling an election promise), but in addition (changing only one word from a quote above):
…to make the slaughtering, breeding, trade and sale of pig meat for human consumption illegal from 2027, and punish such acts with two to three years in prison.
Just imagine the public outcry!
As it is, the egg industry wants an additional decade, and given the mood so far, some members of the sheep industry will quite likely start looking like those farmers who have been protesting in South Korea soon enough. This is despite the live export by sea of sheep, cows, goats, and deer having been phased out by our neighbour, New Zealand since April 2023. NZ can still export by air and so will Australian sheep farmers, so it’s still not an end to the trade as a whole!
It’s possible to have sympathy for such opposing voices from the point of view that no-one wants to see anyone’s livelihood threatened or for peoples’ mental health to suffer. But sometimes, change is necessary for there to be progress toward a better world.
It was an argument with an old friend about the annual Chinese Yulin meat festival that accelerated my thinking about the difference between what we in Australia vs other countries, think of as livestock.
But the uncomfortable, fundamental question is simply this…
Is there an important difference between dogs, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, or deer?
They’re all mammals, like us. They care for their young, show fear, feel pain, and each in their own way, express emotion.
That some may be considered smarter than others is immaterial.
That they are sentient, feeling creatures is not immaterial.
I suspect that the majority of people in Australia, if asked: “would you eat a dog?”, would look at you as if you were insane and disgusting, while at the same time considering eating pigs, sheep or cows to be normal.
That we consider some animals to be friends and others to be food or fur is at least in part, an accident of the circumstances of our birth, the culture we have been raised in.
As Peter Singer declares in his book, Animal Liberation:
I am no more outraged by the slaughter of horses or dogs for meat than I am by the slaughter of pigs for this purpose.
In a very mundane sense, stripped of any notions of reverence, culture is the accumulated beliefs, practices and norms of people, doing things over a long enough period of time that they can say to themselves and to others: “this is what we do and it’s what we’ve always done”.
The same is also often true for the religion people are born into.
But are cultural practices and beliefs always moral and worthy of respect? Sometimes, saying things like “we are upholding our cultural practices by doing XYZ”, when laid bare, is not much different to saying “we are doing XYZ, because that’s the way we’ve always done things around here”.
See the Five Monkeys Experiment for a nice illustration of this.
Are all our laws moral?
Slavery was once legal, widespread and socially acceptable.
Homosexuality was once illegal and in some places, it still is.
The fact that the dog meat trade will soon be illegal in South Korea has no bearing on whether it is now or ever was moral.
Do we really need laws or gods to tell us what is right and wrong?
Can it be that something is moral in one place but not in another, or does it seem more likely that it is just considered illegal or culturally acceptable in one place and time but not another?
If you subscribe to rules-based ethics, what you consider to be right and wrong depends upon the rule, e.g.
- Have dominion over all the creatures of the earth, vs
- prevent unnecessary suffering and death.
If you take your moral guidance from holy books, you are doing what you think gods are telling you to do, which may or may not be the same as what’s right.
Consequentialist ethics tend to focus more on the concrete than the abstract. Suffering and whether or not to consider others as a means to our ends, are the key variables in the moral calculus here.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals, and in their capacity to suffer, a dog, is a pig, is a bear, is a boy.
Philip Wollen