From hot dogs to ‘asocena’

South Korea has made front-page headlines across the world with a new law that bans the butchering of dogs for food, to take effect by, hold your breath, 2027.

The delay in the implementation of the law was a concession to the 1,600 restaurants serving dog meat and some 1,150 dog farms supplying the restaurants. The numbers may seem large but the owners of the restaurants and farms, and their clients, are more of the elderly. One elderly dog farm owner protested when the new law was passed, admitting that dog-eating was declining rapidly anyway and that it should have been allowed to just die out (presumably with the owners of the farms and restaurants).

Dog-eating is an old tradition in both North and South Korea, associated with all kinds of claims for dog meat. The popular name in South Korea is “bosintang,” which means, roughly, soup for vitalizing the body. (In Chinese Mandarin and in Hokkien, the way the words are pronounced and their meanings are almost exactly the same as in Korean.) Dogmeat is particularly popular in the summer, with claims that it cools the body, directly the opposite of claims in the Philippines that dogmeat warms the body.

The decline of dog-eating in South Korea reflects economic and cultural changes. As South Korea prospered, more people took on dogs and cats as pets. The current president of South Korea, Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife have six dogs and they support the ban.

In contrast, dog-eating remains popular in neighboring North Korea, where dogs are seen more as food. A few years back, North Korea Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un banned private dog ownership, calling it “bourgeois decadence.” There were also reports that the government forced dog owners to give up their pets to restaurants, because of a shortage of meat supplies.

After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the new government, using the same label of bourgeois decadence banned pets, although the reasons were more practical and this was that amid food shortages, pets would divert food away from humans. As China prospered, pets came back and they are pampered today.

Yet, in June, there is a Lychee and Dog Eating Festival in Yulin, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, attracting thousands of visitors, with hundreds of dogs transported in to be butchered. Animal welfare groups have been fighting for a ban on the festival, citing public health reasons, but the welfare groups have also tried to get dog-butchering and dog-eating made illegal. Only two cities—Shenzhen and Zhuhai—currently ban dog butchering, and this came about shortly after the COVID pandemic broke out, together with a ban on wildlife for food because of fears that the virus was being spread through animals. (To be clear, the fears of infectious dogs and cats proved to be unfounded.)

In the Philippines, dogmeat remains popular, called “asocena.” The word is sometimes spelled “asucena,” but moves away from the original word origin: “aso,” for dog, and “cena,” for dinner.

We adopted a strategy different from South Korea, banning cruelty to animals in general, to include dog-butchering, under the Animal Welfare Act of 1998, but implementation has been weak. I learned recently that a college I’m running in Tagaytay would have numbers of stray dogs rising and then falling quickly, our staff proudly explaining that the puppies were being adopted quickly. We now have an animal welfare program that includes strict rules on adoption, to make sure the puppies go to good homes and don’t end up as dinner.

Filipinos are presumed to be avid dog-eaters, an image propagated by the 1904 St. Louis Exposition where Igorots imported from the Philippines were put on display, and were made to butcher and eat dogs every day, as people watched. St. Louis residents supposedly sympathetic to the Igorots’ hunger for dogmeat would donate dogs, one man said to have brought in 200 “fat dogs” for them.

I doubt if the Americans were truly sympathetic to the Igorots; what they wanted was spectacle, which was the intention of the human exhibits of the Exposition. Dog-eating has been used repeatedly by Westerners to exoticize non-Westerners as primitive and barbaric. Yet, few people are aware that the “hot dog” had its origins in Germany, where dog eating was common and legal, finally abolished only in 1986 after several failed attempts in their Bundestag (federal parliament). Yes, hot dogs were sold at the St. Louis Exposition but they were not “invented” there, certainly not by the Igorots.

All said dog-eating will die out as more and more people begin to raise dogs inside their homes, as part of their families, and recognize that dogs are more useful as loving companions than as food.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph