Jeju- Island of Animal Abuse

For the last few years I've been lucky enough to call South Korea's Jeju Island my home. The beautiful Jeju is a popular destination for tourists, who are drawn by the island's natural beauty, golf courses, and phallic stone grandfather statues. For promotional purposes, Jeju has been labeled as the "Hawaii of Asia". While Jeju and Hawaii are both islands, Jeju is not isolated, volcanically active, or tropical like its mid-Pacific 'twin'. The many non-native palm trees planted around Jeju give the impression of a Hawaiian tropical paradise, but they do seem to suffer when it snows. A few years ago the Korean government officially declared Jeju the "Island of World Peace". Subsequently, the government has decided to construct a large naval base on Jeju for a fleet of two Aegis destroyer-led squadrons. It seems to me that people are having trouble finding an attractive, apt label for Jeju, so I have decided to come up with one myself. Here it is: Jeju; Island of Animal Abuse.

Most humans seem to enjoy the exploitation and abuse of other animal species. Promoting Jeju as "The Island of Animal Abuse" will highlight the plethora of unethical tourist attractions the island has to offer, and its culture of animal cruelty. This may give Jeju an even bigger slice of the surprisingly lucrative animal-exploitation-and-abuse tourism market. Below is a brief rundown of the Islands' main animal-exploitation-and-abuse attractions, and some associated culture.

Animal exploitation-and-abuse enthusiasts are bound to be aroused by the shows at Pacific Land. Visitors can watch miserable (but permanently smiling) dolphins leaping out of what looks like a large indoor swimming pool (http://pacific.ivyro.net/show/). These dolphins were very probably captured at Taiji in Japan (as seen in The Cove), where their family members were slaughtered with spears. Pacific Land visitors can also see a sea lion performance, and monkeys play guitar and ride a bike.

Part of a sign outside Pacific Land advertising the dolphin show, seal show, and monkey show.

At Crocodile Town visitors can witness a woman place her head inside the mouth of a severely beaten crocodile. Crocodiles aren’t easily trained (as a young man I worked as a crocodile farmer), and lifelong negative reinforcement is required for a crocodile not to bite when a head is placed in its mouth. Basically, if a crocodile ever snaps at, or shows any aggression towards a person, you beat the shit out of it with a big stick. It will eventually learn.

A photo on the Crocodile Town brochure.

Other places where it’s possible to pay to witness animal cruelty include Elephant Park, with its sad elephants, and Hallim Park which boasts a small zoo (replete with a beagle display!). Unfortunately for connoisseurs of animal abuse Magic World has closed down, and with it the thrice daily kangaroo vs. Russian (human) boxing spectacular. When Magic World existed, I often used to wonder that if the helpless kangaroo was any smarter; would it have attempted suicide?

Some animal abuse attractions on Jeju are free! If animal abuse is your thing, then be careful not to miss the seal cages when walking down to the beach at Jungmun (the cages are easy to miss as they are tiny). In the most disgusting of these a very large male seal has been swimming in very tight anticlockwise circles for years. It shares, along with a second smaller seal, a pool not much longer than its body, which often reeks of shit. Separated by bars, people can get within a meter of this beautiful and suffering creature, and torment it with yells and waving arms (I’ve witnessed this).

The suffering anticlockwise seal. Jeju Island.

I personally try to avoid all of this animal-exploitation-and-abuse entertainment, but here in Korea it gets beamed right into my apartment. While channel surfing one evening I encountered every idiot’s fantasy; lions fighting tigers. The program I had stumbled upon featured an attraction at Everland (an amusement park in Seoul) in which lions and tigers share the same enclosure. I wouldn’t describe the program as a documentary, but rather as a highlights-film that showcased the ‘best’ fights between the two species. Apparently a few of these big cats have died in fights.

Cultural tourism is big business, and Jeju culture has a lot of animal suffering to offer. Strolling through Jeju City it’s not hard to find suffering animals like the 2 dogs below my old apartment window. These dogs were kept on a short chain for at least the entire 2 and half years I lived in that apartment (though probably for their entire lives). No play, no walks, nothing. I once enquired to the owner why he kept the dogs, and his wife who spoke a little English replied that “he loves dogs”. He loves making dogs suffer is more like it. Actually, these dogs are lucky compared to the dog my friend saw on an afternoon walk. 2 young police officers had hung it up in a tree and were enjoyably beating it.

Many of Jeju’s dogs live their entire lives on the chain. This cute dog, visible from my English classroom window, probably never gets let off the chain, just like the 2 dogs below my old apartment.

Motorcycling through rural Jeju I’ve several times encountered dog suffering on a larger scale. On dog farms man's-best-friends spend their lives in small clustered wire cages. These dogs are farmed for their meat, and after being hanged or electrocuted, eventually end up in one of the city's many bo-shin-tang restaurants. Bo-shin-tang is dog soup, which some locals believe can magically transfer the dog’s vitality and strength to the hungry human.

Bo-shin-tang's ingredients at a dog farm.

Where I come from, the sufferings of society’s sentient foods are kept away from the dinner plate, but it’s not always so here on Jeju. Sadistic cultural tourists will enjoy the freshness of a certain type of Korean octopus soup. Upon ordering this dish an uncooked pot of vegetables and live octopus is placed on a gas burner in the middle of the table. If the octopus tries to climb out of the heating pot, it can simply be pushed back in with utensils. You’ll have to ask someone else how it tastes.

Jeju is arguably more the “Island of Animal Abuse”, than it is the “Hawaii of Asia” or the “Island of World Peace”, but of course it’s not an attractive label. Despite the popularity of the above mentioned tourist attractions and the endemic poor treatment of Jeju’s animals, tourists and locals alike are unlikely to admit that they find animal abuse attractive. This paradox is easily explained as both Jeju locals and the majority of Jeju’s tourists are Korean, and many Koreans would not share my viewpoint that much of what I have written above actually does constitute animal abuse. South Korea has made some remarkable achievements since the devastating Korean War. It has rapidly rebuilt, embraced democracy, and provided a higher standard of living and greater freedoms to all its human members, but the sufferings of those sentient members without a voice, the animals, has gone largely unnoticed. The animal rights movement seems to have made hardly any impact on Korean culture. Hopefully this will change, and a weakening of Korean speciesism and growth of small groups like Korea Animal Rights Activists (www.animalrightskorea.org) will start to threaten Jeju’s animal-exploitation-and-abuse tourism and its culture of animal suffering.

I actually prefer Jeju’s official label. However, how can Jeju ever truly be the “Island of World Peace” without the animal members of its society being given a peaceful existence (not to mention the peaceful existence of women, gays, and non-Koreans)? I reckon Jeju should retain this label as it is attractive, and as a goal for Jeju society to continue striving towards.