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PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — In North Korea, summer months is not a good time to be a doggy.
In the scorching heat, North Korea’s most significant brewery is pumping out twice as much beer as typical, Pyongyang residents are lining up to get their “bingsu” — a syrupy address manufactured with shaved ice — and restaurants are serving up bowl immediately after bowl of the season’s greatest culinary attraction: spicy canine meat soup.
Euphemistically regarded as “dangogi,” or sweet meat, pet dog has lengthy been believed to be a stamina meals in North and South Korea and is historically eaten through the most popular time of the calendar year, providing a unfortunate twist to the old expressing “doggy days of summer months.”
The dates are fastened according to the lunar calendar and doggy meat usage centers around the “sambok,” or a few hottest days — July 17 and 27, and Aug. 16 this year. Need seems to be specifically substantial this 12 months simply because of a heatwave in East Asia. Temperatures in the North have been among the the optimum ever recorded, hovering near 40 diploma Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in several towns.
As is the circumstance with practically every little thing, good figures are not accessible for how much dog is eaten in the North.
But in South Korea, where even President Moon Jae-in has dogs as pets, at minimum 2 million canines are slaughtered and eaten every yr even though its acceptance as meals is waning. Although many older South Koreans believe that pet meat aids virility, youthful people typically are both in opposition to the follow or indifferent to it and there has been escalating strain to ban it altogether.
On the two sides of the Demilitarized Zone, dogs applied for their meat are elevated on farms for that specific purpose.
“It truly is been our nationwide food due to the fact olden moments,” discussed Kim Ae Kyong, a waitress at the Pyongyang Dwelling of Sweet Meat, the major pet dog specialty cafe in the North Korean capital. “People imagine that heat cures warmth, so they eat dog meat and spicy doggy soup on the most popular times. It really is healthier than other forms of meat.”
The restaurant’s menu lists extra than a dozen pet dishes, such as ribs, hind legs and boiled doggy skin.
Like their neighbors to the South, North Korean attitudes towards canines are modifying.
It is more and more prevalent to see folks walking their puppies on leashes in Pyongyang and other cities in the North, a trend that appears to have just started to capture on in excess of the earlier few decades. Feral canine are frequent in the countryside, however, and still left to fend for them selves.
How chief Kim Jong Un feels about all this is just not known.
But in January he created a place of donating 30 pet canine of 7 breeds — which include a bulldog — to Pyongyang’s freshly renovated Central Zoo, the place pet dogs are put on display screen substantially like the wild animals. The canine centre at the zoo is, in point, 1 of its most well known sights, and posters around the cages make clear how to appropriately care for and feed — not consume — canine companions.
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Talmadge is the AP’s Pyongyang bureau main. Adhere to him on Instagram and Twitter: @EricTalmadge
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