North Korea’s government is accusing people with pet dogs of committing “non-socialist behavior,” Daily NK has learned.
“In view of the growing number of families with pet dogs at home, the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea recently informed its members that treating a dog as a family member who eats and sleeps with the family is incompatible with the socialist lifestyle and should be strictly avoided,” a source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Mar. 8, speaking on condition of anonymity.
According to the source, the practice of keeping pet dogs began in North Korea in the early 2000s. At that time, the government did not consider it a problem because it was mostly officials and donjuLiterally “masters of money,” donju refers to people who hav… More who needed guard dogs to protect themselves and their property from thieves.
“There have always been families who had cats to catch mice, but there weren’t many families with dogs. But that number has gradually increased, and recently there’s been a noticeable rise in foreign breeds of dogs such as Pomeranians and Shih Tzus, which used to be a rare sight in North Korea,” the source said.
North Korean authorities responded by condemning pet dog ownership as an non-socialist behavior, but that had little effect. More recently, however, the authorities have taken more proactive steps to control the practice, which they describe as having “the stench of the bourgeoisie.”
The message conveyed by the women’s union was that “the practice of dressing up dogs as if they were human beings, putting pretty ribbons in their hair, wrapping them in a blanket and burying them when they die is a bourgeois activity. It’s one of the ways wealthy people waste money in a capitalist society.”
“Dogs are basically meat that’s raised outside in accordance with their nature and then eaten when they die. Therefore, such behavior is totally unsocialist and must be strictly eliminated,” women’s union authorities stressed in the message.
The authorities also explicitly said that “the purpose of raising dogs is to collect more furs,”
Women’s union members were further warned that “the fact that more and more people are keeping dogs at home in defiance of the government’s order to raise them for their pelts is a problem,” and that members were being given “a chance to deal with the matter quietly before it triggers a mass movement to eliminate non-socialist behavior.”
A trend that should “die out”
The South Pyongan Province branch of the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea conveyed these orders to local chapters while threatening to organize a struggle meeting for anyone who interferes with efforts to eliminate the non-socialist practice of keeping pet dogs, the source said.
Local branches of the women’s union encouraged members to carry out the orders to prevent the issue from becoming a social problem. The trend of keeping pet dogs should die out, union members were told, as it is not in line with the socialist lifestyle.
But some union members with pet dogs have been driven to tears. “What should I do with the dog I love so much? I can’t just kill it, and I can’t just abandon it,” said one woman.
Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons. For more information about Daily NK’s network of reporting partners and information-gathering activities, please visit our FAQ page here.
Please send any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
Read in Korean
