New Documentary Focuses on Dog Meat Industry in South Korea

ROK Drop favorite Andrew Salmon has an article in the Korea Times about the upcoming release of a documentary about the dog meat industry in Korea:

On Saturday evening, I attended a film screening at a coffee shop arranged by the Seoul branch of the Asian-American Journalists’ Association. The location was comfortable and the company convivial, but the film was not your typical Saturday night bubble-gum viewing. In fact, it was harrowing.

The film was a documentary covering Korea’s dog-meat trade from all angles. Dog farmers – whose demeanors ranged from coolly professional to savagely inhumane – showed their facilities, activities and doomed charges. A pusillanimous National Assembly adviser prattled about the threat to the “national image” if the trade were legalized. An impotent local official accompanied animal rights activists on an inspection visit to a dog farm, where he was turned away at the gate and ended up apologizing to the farmer. Consumers and chefs discussed canine cuisine.

Most traumatically, the documentary captured footage of diseased, wounded dogs in cages; dead puppies being hurled into the trash; livestock slaughtered with blunt instrument strikes to the skull; and packs of dogs crammed into tiny cages for transport from Jeju to mainland markets.

These sequences are benchmarks for under-cover filmmaking. If we accept Sir Max Hastings’ definition of a journalist’s role (“Cause trouble!”), this was fine journalism. It is a challenging film that deserves to be widely viewed and debated. It wrought behavioral change in me: I have eaten dog meat in the past, but after watching this film, won’t again. (Though, having watched it, I reached the opposite conclusion of the animal-rights activists who helped make the film: I am convinced that the sector needs to be fully legalized, so related slaughter and butchery can be properly regulated.)  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but the major point Mr. Salmon makes in his article is that this documentary was not funded by any major news network, but instead crowd sourcing.  I don’t know if crowd sourcing is the answer to better journalism in this era of fake news?