Originally published 2018-07-09.
In June 2018 a municipal court in Bucheon, a city just west of Seoul, convicted a dog farmer and said something no Korean court had said before: wanting to sell or eat the meat is not, in itself, a lawful reason to kill a dog. The ruling did not ban dog meat across South Korea. It was one criminal case, but it gave animal-welfare groups a legal argument they had lacked for decades, and it became an early step on the road to the national ban that parliament passed in January 2024.
Below is what the court actually decided, why the case mattered, how dog meat came to sit in a legal grey zone for so long, and what the 2024 law does and does not prohibit.
What the Bucheon court decided in June 2018
The case was brought by the animal-rights group Care (also written CARE), which had filed a complaint against the operator of a dog farm. Care accused him of slaughtering dogs without a legitimate reason and of breaking building and sanitation rules at the farm.
On 19 June 2018 the court found him guilty and imposed a fine of three million won, roughly 2,000 pounds or 2,700 US dollars at the time. The fine was modest. What made headlines was the reasoning. South Korea's Animal Protection Act forbids killing animals "without justifiable grounds", and the court held that producing meat for sale did not count as such a ground where dogs were concerned.
Care's lawyer, Kim Kyung-eun, told reporters it was the first ruling to treat the act of killing dogs for meat as illegal in itself, and the group's leader, Park So-yeon, predicted that the industry would now face much more pressure. Care said it would hunt down other farms and slaughterhouses and file similar complaints.
Why one ruling was not yet a ban
It helps to be precise about what a lower-court judgment can do. The Bucheon decision applied to one defendant and one set of facts. It did not change any statute, it did not bind other courts in the way a Supreme Court ruling would, and it did not make eating dog meat a crime. Restaurants serving dog stew kept operating, and farms in other provinces carried on.
What the ruling changed was the argument. Before 2018, prosecutors who wanted to act against a dog farm usually had to rely on side issues: illegal buildings, waste disposal, food hygiene, or killing an animal in public view. After Bucheon, campaigners could point to a court that had accepted the core claim that slaughter for meat was not a valid excuse under the welfare law.
How dog meat ended up in a legal grey zone
Dog meat has a long but uneven history on the Korean peninsula. Dog bones with signs of butchery have been found at Neolithic sites, and a 4th-century wall painting in a Goguryeo tomb shows a slaughtered dog. The popular claim that the custom dates "from the first century AD" is a simplification; scholars generally agree that it was never a staple of the Korean diet. During the Joseon dynasty it was eaten mainly on special occasions, most famously as a stew called bosintang on boknal, the three hottest days of the summer, when it was believed to restore stamina.
The legal problem was that dogs never fitted neatly into the system. Dog meat was covered by the 1962 Food Sanitation Act, but dogs were left out of the 1962 Livestock Processing Act, which governs how farm animals are slaughtered and inspected. Dogs were briefly classed as livestock between 1975 and 1978 before that category was removed. The result was an industry that was neither clearly legal nor clearly banned, with little oversight of how animals were kept or killed.
That grey zone is why farms were so hard to regulate, and why a court finding about the Animal Protection Act carried such weight.
How big the industry really was
Numbers about dog meat in Korea vary widely, and some of the most quoted figures are disputed. Activist estimates of one to two million dogs eaten a year circulated for years. A government survey published in 2022 gave a smaller but still large picture: about 521,000 dogs on 1,156 farms, and roughly 388,000 dogs consumed a year in 1,666 restaurants.
What is not disputed is the direction of travel. Older readers may remember dog-meat restaurants as an ordinary part of Korean towns; younger Koreans increasingly see dogs as pets and family members. In a 2022 survey of 1,000 people, 78% said they had not eaten dog meat in the previous ten years, and 87% had no plans to. A 2020 Nielsen poll found 84% had never eaten it, with 59% supporting a ban.
Public opinion on a legal ban moved more slowly than eating habits. Polls around 2017 and 2018 found that most Koreans did not eat dog meat, yet fewer than half wanted the state to outlaw it. Many people who disliked the practice still felt it was a personal choice. By the early 2020s, majorities in several surveys had come round to supporting an end to the trade.
Closures in 2018 and the slow road to a law
The Bucheon ruling arrived in a year of symbolic change. Moran Market in Seongnam, once the country's largest dog-meat market, officially closed its dog trade in 2018 after years of falling sales. In November of the same year the authorities shut Taepyeong-dong, the country's biggest dog slaughterhouse complex, also in Seongnam, with plans to turn the site into a park.
Several bills to end the trade were proposed and stalled in the following years, partly because farmers and restaurant owners argued that they would lose their livelihoods with no help. In November 2023 the governing People Power Party announced that it would back a ban, and the debate moved quickly after that.
What the 2024 ban covers
On 9 January 2024 the National Assembly passed the special act ending the dog-meat industry by 208 votes to none. Its main points:
- From 2027, raising, breeding, slaughtering, selling or distributing dogs for meat is banned, after a three-year grace period.
- Penalties for slaughtering dogs for food go up to three years in prison or a fine of 30 million won; distributing or selling dog meat can bring up to two years or 20 million won.
- No new farms, slaughterhouses or dog-meat restaurants may open, and existing businesses had to file closure plans with their local authorities.
- Compensation and support were promised to help farmers, butchers and restaurant owners change trades, along with plans to rehome dogs left on farms.
- Eating dog meat is not itself made a crime. The law targets the supply chain, not individual diners.
Not everyone welcomed it. Dog farmers protested in late 2023, and the question of what happens to the hundreds of thousands of dogs still on farms remains one of the hardest practical problems for the government and animal charities.
What the case teaches about change
The Bucheon judgment is a good example of how social change often reaches the law in stages. Habits shifted first, as fewer people ate dog meat. Campaigners then tested the existing welfare law in court and won a narrow but important ruling. High-profile closures followed, and only later did parliament write a clear rule. Each step on its own looked small; together they ended a trade that had seemed untouchable a generation earlier.
For readers who care about animal welfare elsewhere, the lesson is that persistence with well-chosen, lawful cases can matter as much as dramatic protests. For anyone curious about Korea, it is a reminder that a "tradition" can be real and old without being shared by most of the people living in a country today.
Sources: Wikipedia: Dog meat consumption in South Korea; Global News, 9 January 2024: South Korea passes ban on dog meat trade. The 2018 ruling was first reported by The Guardian and Truth Theory.
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