North Korea calls dog ownership “unsocialist behavior”

“A trend that is about to die out”

Daily NK has learned that the North Korean government believes that people who have pet dogs are anti-socialist. The Korean Women’s Socialist Union called on people not to humanize animals: not to dress them up in clothes, not to weave ribbons into their wool.

“In view of the growing number of families with dogs at home, the Korean Women’s Socialist Union recently informed its members that treating a dog as a family member who eats and sleeps with the family is incompatible with the socialist way of life and should be strictly avoided,” – An anonymous source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK.

According to the source (but we must be careful here, given the anti-Pyongyang bias of the above-mentioned publication), the practice of owning dogs began in North Korea in the early 2000s. At the time, the government did not consider this a problem because officials mainly needed guard dogs to protect themselves and their property from thieves.

“There have always been families who had cats to catch mice, but there weren’t many families with dogs. But this number is gradually increasing, and recently there has been a noticeable increase in the number of foreign dog breeds such as Pomeranians and Shih Tzus, which were previously rare in North Korea,” the source noted.

The country’s authorities have described the new trend of owning pet dogs as unsocialist behavior. Authorities have recently taken more active steps to control practices they describe as “the stench of the bourgeoisie.”

The message conveyed by the women’s union was that “the practice of dressing dogs up as if they were people, weaving pretty ribbons into their hair, wrapping them in a blanket and burying them when they die is a bourgeois activity.” This is one of the ways rich people waste money in a capitalist society.”

“Dogs are essentially meat, raised outside according to their nature, and then eaten when they die. Thus, such behavior is absolutely anti-socialist and must be strictly suppressed,” representatives of the women’s trade union emphasized in the message. Authorities also said that “the purpose of breeding dogs is to collect more fur.”

Women’s union members were also warned that “the fact that more and more people are keeping dogs at home in defiance of government orders to raise them for their furs is a problem” and that union members were given “a chance to deal with this matter calmly before it causes widespread a movement to eradicate unsocialist behavior.”

The South Pyongyang Province branch of the Korean Women’s Socialist Union passed on these orders to local branches, the source said. Regional outlets urged their members to implement the recommendation to prevent the issue from becoming a social problem. Union members were told that the trend of keeping pet dogs must stop as it was not in keeping with the socialist way of life.

But some union members who have pet dogs were brought to tears.

“What should I do with the dog I love so much? I can’t just kill her and I can’t just leave her,” one woman commented.