hankyoreh

Jan. 7. (Photo by Tak Ki-hyung)

Nam Jong-young

Critical opinion is growing as it learned that over 1 million animals have been slaughtered due to foot and mouth disease as of Friday, many being buried alive. Calls from animal protection groups for humanitarian culling guidelines that minimize the animals’ pain are growing.

At the current culling grounds, instances are being discovered of still-living animals being buried alive, mostly pigs. Scenes are regularly witnessed of live pigs being pushed into burial holes without being given a euthanasia injection and having dirt thrown on them. The animal protection group Kara says that not only was live burials a violation of the law, but also a violation of internal law and immoral, and has started a signature campaign against the practice.

Experts point out that while infectious diseases strike livestock yearly, South Korea’s disease control system lags far behind international standards, with practices like live burial failing to be improved. The guidelines for emergency action for foot-and-mouth disease announced by the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries last October contain nothing regarding animal welfare. The ministry’s regulations curtly call for animals to be slaughtered in the most convenient and quickest way available at the scene among shooting, electrocution, striking or poison, leaving the concrete details to the men on the ground. This does not reflect regulations set down by the World Organization for Animal Health, of which South Korea is a member, which present concrete guidelines for several culling methods, including a suggestion that if you inject the animals with carbon dioxide, it reduces their period of suffering.

With the situation being such, disease control authorities are arbitrarily choosing the slaughtering method at the scene. Lethal injection is the most common, while electrocution and flooding a closed space with carbon dioxide are also being used. Animal protection groups point out, however, that many animals are being buried alive after being given anesthetics or muscle relaxants.

Park So-yeon of the animal rights group CARE said, “The basic principles of minimizing pain and burying the animals only after they are completely dead must be reflected concretely in government guidelines.”

There is also a call for creating an animal disease control organization centered around veterinarians and putting “animal welfare inspectors” at culling scenes.

The government’s attitude, however, places the priority on catching up with the speed of the spread of the disease. They say the key is culling in a short period of time, as foot-and-mouth spreads more quickly than other infectious diseases.

A Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries official said, “In the case of pigs, there have been up to 30,000 to 40,000 animals slaughtered at each farm, and it is too much to expect disease control officials to proceed according to the letter of the guidelines.”

With the recent number of infected livestock growing exponentially, there is now even a scarcity of euthanasia equipment. The government has emergency imported the needed drugs to replenish supplies, but distribution has been a problem.

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