MEET THE MEAT

Firstly, for those of you who don’t know, Tesco/Homeplus is the British version of Walmart.

As it says in my  profile, I recently spent a year in South Korea.

Before reading what these things have to do with other watch this funny short clip to show you what I mean…

(Ok, if you watched that, I particularly liked the line “Tesco slogan changed from ‘Every little helps’ to ‘We control every aspect of your lives’.)

Anyway, enough of Denmark – back to Korea. They have a different idea about care for animals in Korea (says the inveterate meateater). They do eat dogs but less than 10% of them and then usually only on special occasions. This is not going to be an article about eating dog. If anyone was wondering, then I did eat it when I was there but I wasn’t told what it was until after I had begun to eat it. I carried on eating it (that one time) too. I don’t honestly know if I would have eaten it if I had known before. It is odd that people seem to think that eating one kind of animal is ok and another isn’t. It reminds me of the propaganda fuss that was kicked up about the Russians sending a dog and a monkey into space. This is at the time remember when Nuclear tests were being done on American soil. Did the US army send people out to tell every lizard, bird, snake and insect to get out of the way?

The thing I found particularly bad in Korea was not the choice of animal to eat – their diet is considerably more vegetable based than the western ones. It was the pet shops I found upsetting. Everywhere you go there would be pet shops with loads of dogs (very often huskies) rammed into cages with each other in the display window or just outside the shop; they weren’t looking particularly happy or healthy. Either that or they would be in individual little perspex boxes on their own, and those dogs didn’t look particularly pleased either. Those dogs in the pet shop were not for eating. A large number of Koreans keep dogs as pets.

The one that really surprised me however was outside the aforementioned Tesco. In the city I was living in there were a few rabbits and possibly a goat or two housed inside a couple of little cages about 12 feet long and 3 feet wide.

Such a thing would be unthinkable here.

What I mean by that is that actually having the things in cages directly outside the store would mean dreadful publicity for them.

Those animals outside the store were not for eating, it was more of a little petting zoo to amuse the kids.

It is very much ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for most people when it comes to animal welfare, myself included.  Occasionally one of the suppliers for one of the major fast food places or supermarkets are caught out with video evidence – this is one of the reasons that the big chains contract these things out – so that they can’t be blamed for it. That’s why I was so taken aback by what I was seeing.

Most Koreans just passed by it in a blaze of indifference.

Shortly after I arrived in Korea my camera was stolen and I used those little disposable ones instead. For the year I was there I was telling myself every time I went past Tesco to take a picture of the little cages. I never did until the very last day, and I have been home for a while now and I just found the disposable camera and put it in to get developed.

Anyway…if you don’t know what the video below is you will be confused. Just wait till it is loaded up and then the scene that is relevant here begins around 6 minutes 15 seconds. It does cover some slightly uncomfortable ground, even if it is completely bizarre…