Can commercial dog meat ever be humane?
© Korean Animal Welfare Association (KAWA)
Commercial dog meat production is an inherently cruel practice. The animals suffer at every stage, from farming (or capture) through to transport and slaughter.
Why can’t dogs be farmed without cruelty?
WSPA works around the world to improve conditions for animals that have been bred for thousands of years to be suited to a high welfare farm environment. We call for legislation protecting their wellbeing, based on the ‘Five Freedoms’ that set a basic standard for animal welfare.
But the behavioural and physical needs of dogs cannot be met in a commercially viable farm or during long distance transport to markets. For example:
Dogs are highly social animals that suffer when kept in individual cages and deprived of contact with other dogs or humans. However, group housing can also cause suffering through fighting and chronic stress.
Dogs are carnivorous and need a high protein diet. Low profit margins on dog farms often mean dogs are fed poor quality offal or even the carcasses of other dogs, creating a disease-prone food chain with serious consequences for human consumers.
No farm could give dogs the space, feed and care they need and still make a profit.
Given this fact, WSPA supports the stance taken by Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong, where complete bans on the slaughter of dogs for human consumption have been imposed in response both to public concern and health fears around eating these species.
Would regulation help make the industry more humane?
© Korean Animal Welfare Association (KAWA)
Simply put, no. Attempts at regulation have focused on protecting human health rather than animal welfare, as diseases that can be transmitted to humans (including rabies and cholera) are easily spread in the unsanitary conditions dogs are farmed and killed in.
So regulation might lend respectability to the dog meat trade, but would ignore the fact that there is no humane, economically viable method of commercial dog meat production.
Why isn’t regulation a good short-term measure?
As an animal welfare organisation, WSPA seeks to bring an end to cruel practices, not regulate or legalise them. Once legalised, there would be no turning back from the large-scale factory farming of dogs- setting a dangerous precedent for Asia and globally.
Alongside our local partners and other animal welfare organisations, WSPA believes that regulation would:
• legitimise this inherently inhumane industry- meat control may have been improved for human health reasons, but the cruelty would have continued.
• allow the cruel industry to continue under legal protection
• further establish and increase the current welfare abuses with greater sales
• have the potential to create another factory farming industry, despite the abuses apparent in existing intensive animal-rearing systems
• make ending the trade – which WSPA is working with local groups in South Korea and elsewhere to achieve – a more difficult goal.
No country in the world has developed a humane way of farming, raising and slaughtering dogs and WSPA does not believe this can be done.
2 million dogs are killed for meat each year in South Korea alone. Every single one will have suffered.
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