Julien Dugnoille - Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities

Itinerant Commodities

Julien Dugnoille

Purdue University Press|West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2022 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61249-704-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61249-705-1

ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-706-8

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-707-5

Cover image: Via Wikimedia Commons, painting by Yi Am, made of two paintings created around the same time with the same name. Cover also includes background elements manipulated form artwork by Asya_mix/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

I WISH TO THANK the University of Oxfords School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Fulbright IIE Commission, and the Korea Foundation for funding this research. A special thanks to Dr. Inge Daniels for her great supervision. I particularly appreciated her sharp criticism, kindness of heart, and sense of humor. Her input and commitment to this research were remarkable, and I really hope to work with her again in future projects. Thank you to Dr. Jay Lewis for his supervision and support over the course of my doctoral degree. Thank you also to Professor Marcus Banks for having been not only such a kind and encouraging mentor during my studies at Oxford, but also a good friend. Many thanks also to all my colleagues (anonymous or not) who have peer reviewed this manuscript and whose comments have greatly elevated it. In particular, thanks to Daisy Bisenieks for the great discussions, to Roger Goodman, Samantha Hurn, and Javier Lezaun for their thorough and intelligent review of my work during the DPhil, to Eimear Mc Loughlin and Elizabeth Vander Meer for their invaluable input and friendship over the years, and to Frdric Keck and Miwon Seo-Plu for recently helping me see this data in a new light. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all my human and nonhuman participants, whose generosity, patience, and honesty have helped me make sense of a very complex and important topic. I am forever grateful to them. Finally, thank you to JP, to my parents, to Idem, Kyattsu Ai, SangSang, and Toshio, for all the wonderful love, support, and patience I received from them during the writing of this book.

Dog and Cat Biographies in Transcultural South Korea

I N THE LEAD-UP to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, owners of food outlets serving dishes containing dog meat came under particular scrutiny. To avoid offending foreign sensibilities, especially in large urban centers most likely to be frequented by foreigners attending Olympic events, the South Korean government had prohibited the sale of dog meat at markets, and banned restaurants both from selling dog meat-based dishes and from displaying dog carcasses (Derr, 2004, p. 26). Nevertheless, the ban was not strictly enforced, which led some restaurant owners to simply change the name of certain dishes from posintang These euphemistic terms are still used to refer to dog meat dishes today. At the time, this perceived suppression of Korean culture reminded South Koreans of the painful episodes of foreign imperialism (especially under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945), during which many Korean cultural traditions were erased. Demanding that dog meat restaurant owners hide evidence of their dog meat-based dishes during the Olympics thus reignited national feelings of pride in, and protectionism toward, what some saw as a traditional Korean practice. Perversely, the rate of dog meat consumption steadily increased after the Olympics (Kim, 1994).

Right up to this day, and increasingly since the 2002 FIFA World Cup was cohosted by South Korea, a large segment of the South Korean general public proudly defends dog meat consumption as an important part of Korean identity. A 2018 poll in the Korea Herald, for example, found that about half of the South Koreans surveyed were opposed to banning dog meat (Yonhap, 2018). However, in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyngchang, it appeared that the practice of hiding dog meat restaurants would once again be introduced. Indeed, animal activists claim that the provincial authorities of Kangwn offered about 3,000,000 won (about US$3,000) to 18 dog meat restaurants in Pyngchang and Kangnng to conceal or alter their dog meat signs (Pyeongchangs Project to Hide the Dog Meat Restaurants from Olympic Visitors!, 2017). If this state demand to disguise such practices has the same effect on customer numbers as it did after the 1988 Summer Olympics, the general public might once again come to defend dog meat consumption as a key part of Korean culture and identity, to once again fuel a rise in its popularity.

The economies of the trade are very hard to estimate in situ, as dog farming is so controversial and dog meat is neither legal nor illegal, but the price of one bowl of puppy stew, while it varies greatly from one place to another, averages at around US$10. Recent figures reported by the Korean Association for Policy Studies (hereafter KAPS) indicate that of those who consume dog meat, the average frequency of consumption is 4.6 times per year, with an average serving quantity [of] 300 grams per person (Kim, 2008, p. 202). This, Kim concludes, suggests that [d]og meat is the fourth most-consumed meat in the Republic of Korea (Korea) after pork, beef, and chicken; the author adds that the total amount of dog meat consumed each year is approximately 100,000 tonnes (Kim, 2008, p. 202), a figure that includes the dogs processed for the production of