[KS] Beginning of dog-meat consumption

[Frank Hoffmann]

One may add to Dr. Bale's (and other) comments that having dogs for 
meat consumption and dogs as domestic animals was by no means 
considered a contradiction in Korea or elsewhere, probably at no time 
in history. In contemporary South Korea, for example, the Nurŏngi (누렁
이) is considered livestock, raised for meat consumption, while the 
famous Chindo breed (珍島개), actually hunting dogs, are only being 
used as domestic animals (and well, probably very rarely for actual 
hunting). With other breeds the borders are fluent, and not too long 
ago they may also have been very fluent when it comes to these two. I 
have no education in anthropology or ethnography--and both fields seems 
to have their own sets of historical burdens (as it was mostly Western 
scholars talking about the non-West and doing cross-cultural 
comparisons)--but this eating-dog/loving-dog issue, this tagging of 
breeds and name calling (똥개 vs. 백구) seems certainly something 
where, maybe, anthropology could provide some explanations on how these 
issues relate to class and ethnic attitudes in an exclusively human 
society? And possibly how these historically develop, under what 
circumstances.

Best,
Frank


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Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws