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This video shows the disgraceful conditions in which dogs are kept at an illegal dog farm in Gobuk-myeon, Seosan-si, Choongnam (on the mid-west coast of Korea). The video was shot by a KARA investigator in March, 2009.
It clearly shows the filthy, barren and inhuman conditions in which dogs are unnaturally confined.
The stills below highlight some of the points KARA focused on for a protest document to the region's authorities, asking for the farm to be closed down. A translation of the protest letter is here.
Perched on a hill in plain view, it is obvious to everyone that it is a dog farm operation.
Junk yard conditions and rusted, filthy cages show the total disregard for animal welfare and the makeshift nature of the establishment. It has obviously been set up on the cheap with no intention of making any improvements to it.
Here is the dog food storage trough, full of rain water mixed with restaurant refuse. It has a lot of rice, kimchi and seafood, things a dog would not normally eat. This disgusting swill is all the food these poor dogs will ever know.
They will also never know any environment other than the appalling conditions they will have to endure all their lives, crammed in faeces encrusted with other dogs. It has been like that for them since they were pups. Unfortunately, this is normal at dog farms and will not illicit condemnation or moral outrage from authorities.
This being the case, KARA has to focus on other points, such as a lack of sanitation. Under the cages, you can see the excreta piled high, together with urine and rain water. Essentially, it's an open sewer. On the bottom right in the image above, a small gully allows for run off, which goes straight down the hill.
Piled excreta and filth like this was found beneath all of the cages. The farmer is just not bothering to clean it up.
They never feel the joy of touching the ground or running through grass, never exercise or chew a bone or know freedom. They are deprived of everything that is natural to them all their lives.
Here it is possible to see the flow of sewage, going down in steps.
Rather than fix the facilities, as the authorities demanded of him, the farmer erected a fence to block prying eyes.
If you look at the bottom of the first panel of the fence, you'll see a gully carved into shoulder of the slope through which sewage flows. It goes on down the hill and invariably into the water table.
In 2005, horrific conditions were found in two dog farms in Incheon (near Seoul). Government officials were complicit in a number of abuses that occurred and added to them. The following file documents the cases and includes extensive and graphic pictures of the horrors that were found. Click to view.
In 2008, the French organization One Voice conducted an investigation into China's horrific dog meat industry. You would be naive to think the same kinds of things do not happen in Korea.
Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching
consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is
ethical; that it logically involved a re-adjustment of altruistic morals
by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has
been called “The Golden Rule” beyond the area of mere mankind to
that of the whole animal kingdom.
Thomas Hardy
They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass
I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.
Alice Walker
As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor Adorno
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
William Ralph Inge
In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Peter Singer
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
Leo Tolstoy
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas Edison
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
