In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  I take a wander around the dog cages that house about 50–60 dogs. This place is hideous, and most of the dogs look ill and disturbed. They sit in piles of their own excrement and their coats are ragged. Most are thin and show signs of stress such as repetitive actions and twitches, and they cower away from me as I walk past. I'm beginning to feel sick with disgust, so I'm almost grateful when I'm taken to see the slaughterhouse.

  It gets worse. The owner shows me how they slaughter the dogs: they put them in an iron cage and clip a wire to it that's connected to the positive wire on a plug, then using an iron bar, they complete the circuit to the negative wire. The cage is basically connected directly to the mains electricity, the fuses are overridden and the dog is electrocuted. The owner plugs it in and shows me – it can clearly get messy because the cage and the bar are a bit rusty, so there are lots of sparks, and the connection is a bit tricky to maintain. He claims that the dog takes four or five seconds to die, and altogether it sounds like a dreadful way to go. Oh, and all this is done in full view of the other dogs.

  I ask the owner if this place is legal, and he says, 'According to the law, it's neither legal or illegal. They're not telling us to kill dogs, but they're not stopping us either.'

  This place is horrific, and I say as much to Dr Dogmeat. I wouldn't eat any meat – dog or chicken – that I knew had been raised in conditions this dreadful. What was he thinking bringing a BBC journalist to a place like this when the issue is so sensitive? His reply is to tell me not to use the footage that's been shot, but it's too late for that.

  I leave the farm, and 200 metres down the road I spot a beef farm, so I stop to take a look. Perhaps I've taken things out of context – maybe all livestock in Korea is raised in grim conditions. I poke my head over the barn gate and I am greeted by an extraordinary sight: the cows are listening to Korean ballads played to them on a stereo (I swear I'm not making this up); they are in large, clean, smart barns with ample room, fresh straw and proper ventilation. There are calves and mature cows living in conditions that I can only marvel at. They look healthy, happy and secure. You couldn't engineer a greater contrast if you wanted to.

  Moran Market

  To find out even more, I need to visit Moran market, a huge food market a little way out of town that's renowned for selling dogmeat and live dogs for slaughter. It's sort of un-legal (rather than illegal) to sell dog, but in the past, the police have raided it and thrown dog traders out to appease the Western press, so they hate anyone filming there and have been known to get extremely aggressive. With this in mind, I am, for the first time in my life, going to wear a hidden camera.

  I meet my two slightly dim, uncommunicative security guards and have a safety briefing. Yoon-Jung has a moment of epiphany and decides that she doesn't agree with filming the dog sellers – she's worried about people losing their livelihoods – so I agree to go on my own, but it's a tricky one, this moral relativism thing.

  First, I wander around to get a feel for the market. I love these places – they are little microcosms of the societies they serve and are always full of wild, exuberant characters. There's a whole rice-puffing zone with revolving cannons, underneath which is a gas burner. They heat the rice until it explodes with a colossal BOOM, and it blows into a waiting bag. They make puffed rice, puffed beans and Lord knows what else. But more importantly, these stalls are a gossip arena for garrulous old biddies who crowd around the cannons. Cheeky, naughty and downright rude, these women enjoy the exploding cannons as much as any lily-livered foreigner, and each explosion is greeted with whoops of joy and squeals of fear.

  I buy some charcoal-smoked seaweed sheets from a nice guy who spends his entire life wafting sheets over a charcoal stove. Piles and piles of ginseng are sold on an unprecedented scale; the spindly roots are the cheapest. I buy a pile of the medium roots at 20,000 South Korean won (KRW, informally known as kwon) for 300 g, which works out at a bit more than ten quid. Cheap at the price, until I realize that I can't take them through customs anyway.

  Having recc-ed the market, I set up the camera and start filming. One area deals in all live animals, including dogs, black goats, chickens, ducks and rabbits. I'd hate to make any wild assumptions, but I'll tell you this: the people on these stalls couldn't give a toss for animal welfare. Dogs aren't treated any worse – every animal suffers. They are all crammed into small cages, sitting in their own excrement.

  The dogs are squeezed into cages in front of the stalls, often sharing the cage with the odd goat. The dogs that aren't bored or snarling look terrified, especially when they're pulled out by the neck to be taken away for a customer. I meet a woman who shows me a few grim carcasses, and I have to remind myself not to be appalled at the sight of a dead dog – we should deal with sights like these in return for our carnivorousness.

  I wander up and down, getting lots of shots of the dogs and the conditions they live in and when I feel I have enough footage, I drop off the hidden camera and exchange it for the full-sized one that everyone can see. This outing proves to be very different. I go up to every single dog seller in the market to see if I can ask them a couple of questions, but the moment they see the camera they become very aggressive, pushing me away, shouting and threatening to smash the equipment. Of course, no one is obliged to be accommodating to TV crews, but I am surprised at the level of their anger.

  I persist with one guy and ask him why he won't let us film. Eventually, off-camera, he explains that after someone had filmed in the past, a critical programme was broadcast and the government had closed them down. I ask him over and over again why he thinks people object to dogmeat, but he refuses to answer me.

  Is it right to destroy someone's livelihood for the sake of animal rights? Well, I don't think we should tell Koreans to stop dealing in dogs any more than they should tell Britons to stop dealing in chickens. But just as I don't think chickens should be raised in battery conditions, dogs in Korea should at least be protected by animal welfare regulations that respect their health, life and means of death – it's really not so much to ask.

  My thoughts about dogmeat have definitely changed since I arrived. I genuinely thought I'd have no problem with eating it, that I'd relish the adventure, and maybe even enjoy the discomfort I'd cause to all those carnivorous hypocrites watching appalled in front of the telly at home before they tucked into their battery chicken dinners. It would be obtuse of me to ignore emotional reactions to food, but the reality is that there are huge animal welfare issues to bear in mind.

  Bloody Sundae

  Yoon-Jung takes me to meet some of her younger friends at a blood sundae emporium (pig's blood, not dog's). Sundae is a young person's dish (although no one manages to explain to me why) and doesn't seem to have anything to do with ice cream (which is a shame because I wouldn't mind trying blood ice cream sundae). Instead it's a huge pan of vegetables and Korean black pudding that you either fry or boil at the table and share with your friends: just the sort of food I love best. It's a mess, but it tastes great – like bubble and squeak with lots of vegetables and black pudding.

  I ask Yoon-Jung's friends what they think about eating dog. They are a bunch of college kids, and about half of them have tried dog. The girls all wrinkle their noses at the thought of it and the guys all agree that it's really only popular with older men, mainly because it's supposed to be good for your sex life. I ask them if they think it's OK to eat dog, and the reactions are mixed – the girls all hate the idea of it, but they wouldn't dream of telling someone not to eat food that they enjoy. The guys say that it's fine to eat, but they aren't keen on the taste. I ask what they think about the West making such a fuss over dogmeat, and one guy says, 'The UK does some terrible things too, like invading Iraq. Why do people feel that they can come to Korea to criticize our culture?'

  When we've finished talking I ask what mayhem young Koreans like them will cause tonight (it's Saturday). The girls say that they're going to a movie and the guys are going to spend the evening at a f
riend's house playing computer games. I'm astounded – here are the hip kids of Korea blowing their weekends in darkened rooms staring at computer screens. I spent my years at college acting in terrible plays and trying to get off with girls. I guess you could say that I was also wasting my life in darkened rooms, but somehow I'm glad I did it my way rather than theirs.

  Cooking with Buddhists

  I wind my way through a grim residential area of square metal houses plonked indiscriminately on scrubby yards mixed with shabby light industrial units. Suburban Korea isn't a pretty place. Eventually the sea of grotty houses parts, and I find myself at the base of a pile of huge rock steps leading up to a beautiful, if garish, Buddhist temple. This is the Wonjeoung-ri temple, comprising the Institute of Korean Buddhist Food. I'm taken into the main temple to pay my respects to Buddha, then I'm whisked off to meet Jeuk Moon, the chief priest, for a cookery lesson.

  As we talk, Jeuk Moon becomes more relaxed. He says that you can smell a meat-eater, but when I offer him my armpit and ask him to guess what my last meal was, he graciously declines. I ask what his favourite food is and he replies that food is an earthly pleasure and that monks aren't supposed to dwell on it . . . but if he's drawn on the matter, he'd have to plug for fried bean rice.

  I ask if there's anything that he misses from the outside world and he thinks for a while. He says he'd really like to wear a suit. I suggest that if the monk thing doesn't work out, he should give me a call and we could swap jobs for a while. He promises to bear it in mind.

  I like Jeuk Moon; he's dignified and humble yet he inspires instant respect. He's calm, smart, spiritually purified and perfectly rotund. Everything you want from your Buddhist priest.

  We have a lot of fun cooking – he teases me for anything I get wrong, but stubbornly refuses to accept that my food tastes better than his, which it patently does (OK, spiritually it might be inferior, but try telling that to a set of taste buds). We cook deep-fried thingy, wrapped whatsitcalled and steamed rice with stuff (even Yoon-Jung couldn't decipher the names). The wrapped whatsitcalled is particularly beautiful, the sort of dish a feckless food writer would prepare simply because it would look gorgeous in a photo – raw enoki mushrooms, shreds of water chestnut, ginseng root, juju strips and half a pine nut, all wrapped in a thin strip of ginseng or cucumber. It tastes OK, but not spectacular – a subtle combination of gentle sweet flavours.

  The rice is packed in bamboo cups with water and all manner of oriental gubbins: lotus seeds, nuts and roots of this, beans of that. We cover them in paper and tie them up with string. Out in the exterior kitchen, a massive iron cooking pot sits on a log fire, warming up under the watchful gaze of a portrait of Buddha. We pay our respects to him, and Jeuk Moon stokes the fire before leaving for evening prayer. I am to meet him later to eat all the food we've cooked.

  I am taken to the temple. At the back sit three chirpy, fat golden Buddhas joyfully contemplating nirvana. Behind these are thousands more tiny ones on shelves that line the entire back and side walls of the temple. It's like being in a religious version of Hamleys. It's so much happier and calmer than our Christian churches and I begin to think that this Buddhist thing is right up my street.

  A monk sings a dirgey prayer and I am told to follow his lead with lots of genuflecting, and I enjoy it. I also do lots of prostrating while the monk sings his songs and rings his funny wooden bell. I haven't a clue what's going on, but it's very nice, very calming and somehow makes me feel purified.

  Dinner's next. I'm shown into a room with plush cushions on the floor, including a particularly comfy one that clearly isn't reserved for me. Eventually Jeuk Moon arrives and sits himself down on it with great ceremony. I'm a little nervous because all the cheekiness and fun from our cooking lesson has dissipated and he's become stony faced. It's time for me to bring up the main topic for discussion – something that I haven't warned him we will be asking about: eating dog.

  The room is almost silent except for the slurping of soup and tinkling of wooden chopsticks and I take the plunge: 'Does the idea of eating dogmeat upset your Does it disgust you?' I ask clumsily.

  Quick as a flash, Jeuk Moon barks at me: 'No talking during dinner.'

  Oh, great.

  And so we sit there eating in silence. I'm not ashamed to tell you that I hate eating in silence. Call me spiritually impoverished if you will, call me worldly and impure, but I can't think of anything worse than four people listening to each other slurping.

  After an excruciating 30 minutes of eating, Jeuk Moon finally declares that dinner is over, and he is ready to talk.

  So, to the vegetarian issue: 'People can be reincarnated as animals so you could end up eating a person, even a relative.'

  'And dogs? Would you get into that crazy situation where by eating a dog you might be eating a relative?'

  Ah,' he says, as if he knew that this bloody dog question was bound to crop up eventually. 'Yes, that's logical from a religious point of view. A good Buddhist wouldn't eat dog because he might be eating a friend or old relative.'

  So do you think Koreans should ban the consumption of dogmeat?

  No, no, no. it's a food tradition that some of our ancestors enjoyed, so it shouldn't be criticized or condemned.'

  Eh? Even a man with the weight of religious doctrine behind him won't criticize his fellow Koreans. I'm beginning to feel that Koreans have such an irrational fear of embarrassment that they turn a blind eye to things that upset them: it's just not done to criticize other people here, and I'm not sure if this makes for a particularly healthy society.

  In the morning, after being told off for not eating the vast mound of horrid, tasteless rice porridge I've been served, I am invited for a last audience with the chief priest at a traditional tea ceremony. He's in ebullient form and he shows me a picture frame on which is written 'Drink your tea' in Korean. He explains that a famous Buddhist priest he knew always responded to complex theological questions with the phrase 'Drink your tea', meaning that the answer to a direct question was not necessarily a direct answer and knowledge doesn't necessarily come through rationalization. Hmm. Sounds a bit of a cop-out to me.

  I have my photo taken with Jeuk in front of his temple, and leave feeling enlightened, though what exactly I'm enlightened about I'm not sure. I was enlightened of 280,000 kwon (around £152) for my stay, plus a few quid for some fetching candles bearing the words 'May all your wishes come true'.

  On the way back I drop in to the enormous Olympic Stadium. Given that it was during the build-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics that the world really started taking a pop at Korea for eating dog, it seems like a symbol for the way the issue has been brushed under the carpet. I challenge my producer Alex to a lap of the track, which I complete in world record time (probably), although he retires hurt after 70 metres.

  Petian Castle

  I visit Petian Castle, a gloriously kitsch temple to dogs the entrance of which is marked by a 6-metre-high fibreglass bone. Outside is a patch of scrubland for your pooch to crap in, and next to it is a pool for it to swim in (closed September-May). Inside is a mini-mall comprising an extensive dog supermarket, a beauty parlour, a photo studio for pet portraits, a veterinary surgery, meeting rooms, offices and a restaurant. Everything the obsessive pet owner could want. The restaurant offers a selection of meals for humans, and a fine chicken breast dish for their pets. The chef isn't very keen on speaking to us – maybe he feels professionally humiliated at having to cook food for dogs, I don't know.

  It's schnauzer day, and there must be 40 of the yapping little terrors here, along with their owners. These people are potty about dogs – one girl says that her dog is a substitute child and that she spends one third of her income on the snappy, yappy little brute, which sports a garish dress with a skirt that sticks up in the air in an oddly indecent fashion. Another dog wears a pink velour track suit that I swear wouldn't look out of place on Vicky Pollard.

  Excellent: a chav schnauzer!

  You could sa
y that dog owners are just as bad as dog eaters: they incarcerate animals in an alien environment and use them as fashion items, symbols of wealth or emotional props, and have them put down when they are no longer viable pets. Dogs are meant to live in the wild, and breeding them for human comfort is tantamount to torture. It's all in the delivery, see.

  I meet 'Hyper', a Korean canine TV superstar who appears in a hit soap opera every week and gets treated as an actor rather than a performing dog. Apparently it's a great privilege for me to meet him. I ask if Hyper finds it easy to get laid with all that fame, and his owner sheepishly says, 'He likes girls'. What a life.

  This ought to be a great place to find some dog-loving fanatics virulently opposed to the dogmeat industry but everyone I speak to has the same reaction: 'I'm not a fan of dogmeat myself, but if someone else wants to eat it, that's fine. Who am I to stop them?' I try winding them up into a righteous frenzy, but they're having none of it. When I ask about animal rights, they all have a vague sense that animals should be protected, but they seem more concerned about the government providing better dog-walking parks than protecting the welfare of farm animals. It's as though they haven't really thought about it.

  When I take a look around the boarding kennels, I'm shocked to find a stinky block of steel cubicles. If I'd been told it was a dog farm, I'd have found it as disconcerting as Mr Chin's farm. The dogs have nothing in the cages to entertain them, they can't see each other, but can hear each other barking incessantly and they look frustrated and a little disturbed. At least in the farm they could all see and play with other dogs.

  My guide to the castle is their glossy dog magazine's editor, and although he reckons that dog owners are often a bit too obsessive, bordering on abusive, in their approach to caring for their dogs, he is not to be drawn on the subject of eating dogmeat.

  'Each to his own,' he says. 'Who am I to judge my fellow Koreans on something they've been doing for years?'