Every conversation begins with the polite compulsory inquiry as  to one’s current state: “How are you?” But no one ever really wants to  know how you are. No one really wants to hear what is truly on your  mind. They want you to smile politely back, give the standard answer  “fine”, and be on your way. This is particularly true if what is always  on your mind is something deeply disturbing and upsetting. “Please just  keep it to yourself”, is what they are thinking. But keeping it to  myself has been getting harder and harder to do.

The fact is I live in dog meat country. Not only do I live in South  Korea, but I live in the heart of the dog meat industry. Our house is  literary surrounded by dog farms. You can hear them all the time.  Yelping and barking and crying. Koreans believe that when pain is  inflicted on the dog a certain type of energy is released into the  system which is transferred to the consumer of the meat. It is believed  to endow the consumer with sexual potency and  vitality. For this  reason, when it is time to kill a dog, it is done in such a way as to  inflict the most amount of pain possible on the animal. A common way to  kill and torture these animals is to hang them by their necks and beat,  burn and electrocute them to death. I can hear them, and if I leave my  house, I can see them. They are all breeds and sizes. They look just  like my dog and your dog. They live packed together in small boxes  through the bitter, biting winters and the humid, scalding summers. They  are forced to live in their own feces and are fed rotten table scraps  of Korean food such as kimchi. Many of these animals are so malnourished  they suffer from diseases such as rickets and their legs can barely  hold them up. Dogs are slaughtered in plain sight of the other dogs and  are often placed right on top of the kennels to bleed out. This happens  about two million times a year here.

It gets worse. It’s legal. There is nothing that can be done about  it, I am told. I can complain about the noise, and perhaps a police  officer will be dispatched to look into it, but nothing will be done  about the abuse and torture.

Now you may say “What about America? We treat our livestock pretty  badly there too. Does anyone have the right to come in and tell us we  have to shape up our meat industry?” I say “YES”. If they are  contributing millions of dollars to our safety and our economy then YES.  If they make trade agreements with us then YES. My tax money goes into  the Korean economy and contributes to their ability to continue to  torture animals. That is torture for me to think about. If you bother to  look into the American meat industry at all, AT ALL, you would be  horrified. It is horrible. I don’t support it. I am a vegetarian. If you  bothered to look into the Korean dog meat industry it would haunt you.  It is haunting.

But I have to smile and nod. I see my neighbors do the same. They  don’t seem to have as much trouble as I do though. They seem to have the  ability to block it all out. I try to do this too, but then I only feel  worse. Ignorance is bliss, but I know.

Most people don’t know, and don’t want to know because it's much too  upsetting. This simple fact ensures that this practice can go on  unabated.