Originally published 2021-05-31.
In May 2021, reports from inside North Korea said authorities in several towns along the Chinese border had ordered residents to catch and kill cats and pigeons, apparently out of fear that the animals could carry COVID-19 across the frontier. The claims came from Daily NK, a Seoul-based outlet that relies on anonymous sources inside the country, and could not be independently confirmed. Foreign tabloids quickly turned them into a nationwide decree from Kim Jong Un, which goes further than the original reporting supports. There is also no known case of a cat or pigeon passing the virus to a person.
Here is what was actually reported, what scientists know about animals and the coronavirus, and why stories like this from North Korea are so hard to pin down.
What Daily NK reported
According to a Daily NK article published on May 27, 2021, officials in Hyesan, Sinuiju and other border areas had told people to "catch and eliminate" pigeons and cats as part of their anti-epidemic campaign. Residents were reportedly also shooting at birds that flew over from China, and both pet and stray cats were targeted.
The outlet described one specific case. In Hyesan, in Yanggang Province, a family of four had kept a cat despite a local order banning animals in the border zone, and had told inspectors it had died. On May 22 the cat was spotted near the border fence. Border guards chased it, and after two days of searching officials traced it back to the family. The cat was taken away, and on May 24 the family was sent to a quarantine facility for 20 days. Some later retellings described soldiers storming a man's home and killing his pet, but the original report speaks of the family's isolation and the animal being taken.
The source also told Daily NK that many local people doubted a cat could cross the river into China and back, and questioned why officials pursued it so hard. Some commentators abroad suggested a second motive for culls of animals: in a country with chronic food shortages, animals compete with people for scraps. That idea is speculation rather than reported fact.
Can cats or pigeons spread COVID-19?
Cats can catch SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, usually from infected people they live with. Big cats can too: in spring 2020 a Malayan tiger named Nadia at the Bronx Zoo in New York tested positive, along with other tigers and lions there, after likely exposure to an infected keeper. The animals had mild symptoms and recovered.
The question that matters for public health is whether animals pass the virus back to people. During the period covered by this story, there was no documented case of a cat infecting a human, and health agencies described the risk of animals spreading COVID-19 to people as low. Pigeons and other birds have not been shown to be meaningful hosts of the virus at all. Culling them would do nothing to stop human-to-human transmission, which was always the main route.
Health agencies in other countries gave very different advice to pet owners: keep a sick person away from pets where possible, and never abandon or harm animals out of fear of the virus.
North Korea's pandemic in context
North Korea reacted to the outbreak in China earlier and harder than almost any other country. It halted flights and banned foreign tourists from January 23, 2020, and sealed most of its borders. Through 2020 and 2021 state media insisted the country had no confirmed cases, a claim many outside analysts doubted.
Border measures became extreme. In September 2020, a South Korean fisheries official who drifted into North Korean waters was shot dead and his body burned under emergency anti-virus rules, an incident for which Kim later apologised. Against that background, reports of animals being hunted near the border sounded plausible to many observers, even if the details could not be checked.
The country's health system is weak and short of equipment and medicines, partly because of poverty and international sanctions. In 2021 it turned down vaccine offers, including about two million AstraZeneca doses and three million Chinese doses through the COVAX scheme. In May 2022, North Korea finally admitted an outbreak, declaring a "severe national emergency" and reporting hundreds of thousands of "fever" cases. By August 2022 it declared victory over the virus, with an official death toll of 74 that few outside experts accept.
The wider crackdown on foreign influence
Reports of the animal culls arrived alongside stories about a tightening grip on everyday life. Foreign media reported in 2021 that skinny jeans, dyed hair and certain hairstyles, including the mullet, were being targeted as signs of "anti-socialist" Western influence. These accounts also came mainly from defectors and unnamed sources and remain hard to verify.
The ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun did publish commentary warning that a country could collapse like a damp wall
if it failed to hold on to its own way of life, regardless of its military or economic strength. That message, in the official press, matches the direction of the reported crackdown even where the specific rules are unconfirmed.
How to read reports from North Korea
North Korea allows no independent press, and foreign journalists cannot report freely inside the country. Much of what the world learns comes from three sources: state media, which shows only what the government wants seen; satellite imagery; and networks of informants and defectors, used by outlets such as Daily NK and Radio Free Asia. Those networks have broken real stories, but single-source claims can be wrong, exaggerated or outdated.
A few habits help:
- Trace the claim back. A tabloid headline about "Kim ordering" something often rests on one anonymous source describing local officials.
- Watch the scope. An order in a few border towns is not the same as a nationwide law.
- Look for words like "reportedly". When the original reporters hedge, retellings should too.
- Check the science separately. Even if an order was real, that does not mean its reasoning was sound.
The cats-and-pigeons story is a good example. There is credible local reporting that animals were targeted in some border areas in 2021. There is no evidence of a nationwide decree, and no evidence that the animals posed a meaningful COVID-19 risk to anyone.
Sources: Daily NK, May 27, 2021; COVID-19 pandemic in North Korea (Wikipedia); Bronx Zoo (Wikipedia); The Mirror.
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