Jin-hui, a cream-colored Pomeranian, was buried alive and left for dead in 2018 in the South Korean port city of Busan.
No charges were filed against its owner at the time, but animal abusers and those who abandon pets are soon to face harsher punishment as South Korea plans to amend its civil code to grant animals legal status, South Korean Office of Legal Counsel Director-General Choung Jae-min said in an interview.
The amendment, which must still be approved by the South Korean National Assembly, likely during its regular session next month, would make South Korea one of a handful of countries to recognize animals as beings, with a right to protection, enhanced welfare and respect for life.
Photo: Reuters
The push for the amendment comes as the number of animal abuse cases increased to 914 in 2019 from 69 in 2010, data published by a lawmaker’s office showed, and the pet-owning population grew to more than 10 million people in the country of 52 million.
South Korea’s animal protection law states that anyone who abuses or is cruel to animals may be sentenced to a maximum of three years in prison or fined 30 million won (US$25,498), but the standards to decide penalties have been low as animals are treated as objects under the existing legal system, Choung said.
Once South Korea’s Civil Act states that animals are no longer simply things, judges and prosecutors would have more options when determining sentencing, he said.
Photo: Reuters
The proposal has met with skepticism from the Korea Pet Industry Retail Association, which said that laws are in place to protect animals.
“The revision will only call for means to regulate the industry by making it difficult to adopt pets, which will impact greatly not only the industry, but the society as a whole,” association director-general Kim Kyoung-seo said.
Choung said that the amended civil code would also pave the way for follow-up efforts, such as life insurance packages for animals and the obligation to rescue and report roadkill.
The amendment is likely to be passed, said lawmaker Park Hong-keun, who heads the Animal Welfare Parliamentary Forum, as there is widespread social consensus that animals should be protected and respected as living beings that coexist in harmony with people.
Animal rights groups welcomed the South Korean Ministry of Justice’s plan, while calling for stricter penalties for those who abandon or torture animals, as well as a ban on dog meat.
“Abuse, abandonment and neglect for pets have not improved in our society,” Korea Animal Rights Advocates head Cheon Chin-kyung said.
Despite a slight drop last year, animal abandonment rose to 130,401 cases last year from 89,732 in 2016, the South Korean Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency said.
South Korea has about 6 million dogs and 2.6 million cats.
Jin-hui, which means “true light” in Korean, now enjoys spending time with other dogs at an animal shelter south of Seoul.
“Its owner lost his temper and told his kids to bury it alive. We barely managed to save it after a call, but the owner wasn’t punished, as the dog was recognized as an object owned by him,” shelter manager Kim Gea-yeung said. “Animals are certainly not objects.”
HAVANA: Repeated blackouts have left residents of the Cuban capital concerned about food, water supply and the nation’s future, but so far, there have been few protests Maria Elena Cardenas, 76, lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street. “You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city. Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food
U-TURN? Trami was moving northwest toward Vietnam yesterday, but high-pressure winds and other factors could force it to turn back toward the Philippines Tropical Storm Trami blew away from the northwestern Philippines yesterday, leaving at least 65 people dead in landslides and extensive flooding that forced authorities to scramble for more rescue boats to save thousands of terrified people, who were trapped, some on their roofs. However, the onslaught might not be over: State forecasters raised the rare possibility that the storm — the 11th and one of the deadliest to hit the Philippines this year — could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea. A Philippine provincial police chief yesterday said that 33
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the
PROPAGANDA: The leaflets attacked the South Korean president and first lady with phrases such as: ‘It’s fortunate that President Yoon and his wife have no children’ North Korean propaganda leaflets apparently carried by balloons were found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, yesterday, including some making personal attacks on the country’s president and first lady. The leaflets attacking South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee found in the capital appear to be the first instance of the North Korean government directly sending anti-South propaganda material across the border. They included graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of failures that had left his people living in despair, and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable. The leaflets included photographs of the