North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un has demanded pet dogs be commandeered by North Korea’s law enforcement in the capital city Pyongyang, declaring that man’s best friend stands for a symbol of Western “decadence.” However, some North Korean pet owners have expressed alarm that their dogs are going to help feed the starving populace.
Sources told South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo Kim gave the order to collect household pets in July, maintaining they represented a “tainted trend by bourgeois ideology.”
Chosun Ilbo reports that although North Korea has long frowned upon pet ownership, the hermit state had seemed to take a softer approach on the issue beginning in the late 1990s when the affluent citizens of Pyongyang started keeping pets as status symbols of supremacy over the lower class.
“Ordinary people raise pigs and livestock on their porches, but high-ranking officials and the wealthy own pet dogs, which stoked some resentment” amid the poorer citizens, the source explained.
“Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down,” the source said.
As the tyrannical government claims the decision is to rein in capitalist excess in their capital city, the owners who miss their beloved pets are worried that the new policy was devised as a way to feed the general population due to North Korea being famously low on food, and dog meat is commonly on the menu in that part of the world.
The Daily Mail reports that a study by the United Nations shows that as much as 60 percent of North Koreans are dealing with “widespread food shortages.” Recently heavy rain followed by immense flooding in the area have given the government cause for alarm about crop damage and low food supplies in the secluded nation.
The source stated that some of the adored pets are being sent to state-run zoos or their meat is sold to dog-meat restaurants.
“It’s been our national food since olden times,” said a waitress at the Pyongyang House of Sweet Meat, Kim Ae Kyong, who works at the top dog specialty restaurant in the area. “People believe that heat cures heat, so they eat dog meat and spicy dog soup on the hottest days. It’s healthier than other kinds of meat.”
Guests at the Pyongyang House of Sweet Meat can enjoy a variety of K-9 delicacies at their restaurant, which boasts over a dozen dog dishes that include ribs, hind legs, and even boiled dog skin.
Dogs are known locally on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone as “dangogi,” or sweet meat. Dogs are considered in the region to be a food that helps stamina and is customarily consumed during the hotter months of the year.
North Korean positions on dogs as pets have been evolving in recent years to be more akin to their Southern neighbors.
In Pyongyang and other Northern cities within the Marxist dictatorship people out walking man’s best friend on leashes have become the fashion that seems to have caught on over the last few years. Feral dogs are also found commonly in the countryside, and risk running afoul of hungry passersby. One defector told South Korean news outlets that crackdowns like this are typically enforced selectively, without eagerness from the authorities, but on this occasion appears to be taken more seriously.
The source says the dog lovers of the city are “cursing Kim Jong Un behind his back,” but are aware there is not much of a choice in the communist repressed state.