Gaegogi
Korean Name
Revised Romanization	Gaegogi
McCune-Reischauer
Hangul	개고기
Hanja	(none)

Gaegogi (also, Kaegogi) literally means "dog meat" in Korean. Gaegogi, however, is often mistaken as the term for Korean soup made from dog meat, bosintang (보신탕).

The distaste felt by dog lovers, particularly from the West but also within Korea, with respect to eating dog has made this dish controversial in recent years.

During the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea's capital city, the South Korean government asked its citizens not to consume dog meat to avoid bad publicity during the games. Korean law technically prohibits dog meat, but the laws are not enforced. The controversy surfaced again in 2001 when the 2002 FIFA World Cup soccer games were held jointly in Korea and Japan. The organizer of the games, under pressure from animal rights groups such as PETA, demanded that the Korean government re-address the issue, but little changed.

Many people have argued that international organizations such as FIFA and PETA have no right to interfere with an ancient Korean custom, maintaining that the only difference between slaughtering a dog for food and slaughtering a cow or a pig is the culture in which it is done. Pet owners and those in related industries assert that the relationship between working animals, pets and their owners is intrinsically different to that between humans and domesticated animals raised for food. Another part of the controversy stems from the methods of slaughter, one of which includes beating to death by clubs to ensure that the dog is filled with adrenaline, believed to increase the sexual stamina of the (usually male) eater.

The average Korean does not consume dog meat on a regular basis, as it is generally considered a medicinal dish (either to promote male virility or to combat the heat in summer). Many Korean Buddhists consider eating dog an offense.

External Link

• "The Politics of Dog", by John Feffer, American Prospect vol. 13 no. 10, June 3, 2002.
• Vietnam's Dog Meat Tradition by BBC