POWs, abductees, defectors and separated families are the legacy of the Korean War
Prisoners of war held for decades after the fighting stopped. Civilian abductees. Defectors. Separated families.
They are Koreans who symbolize the decades of division and bitter animosities between North and South Korea, which have been split by a heavily fortified border since the the 1950-53 Korean War.
Koreans aren't allowed to exchange visits, phone calls or letters with their loved ones on the other side.
Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the war's beginning. The Associated Press spoke with Koreans whose pain and sorrow likely won't be healed anytime soon as diplomacy between the Koreas remains dormant.
South Korean prisoner of war isolated after his return home
Lee Seon-wu, who was a South Korean soldier, lost three fingers and was captured by Chinese troops during a fierce battle in the eastern Gangwon province in the final days of the war. Like tens of thousands of other South Korean prisoners, Lee was held by North Korea even after a peace treaty ended the fighting. He was forced to resettle as a miner in the country's remote northeast.
In North Korea, Lee said he belonged to the lowest social class and married a poor woman. He also lived under constant state surveillance.
In 2006, he fled to South Korea via China, only to learn that his parents and two of his three siblings had already died. Lee said he was shunned by his nephew, who likely worried Lee would demand the return of land that was originally bought with compensation money that authorities gave to his family after they wrongly concluded that Lee had died in the war.
Now 94, he doesn't stay in touch with any relatives in South Korea and misses family members in North Korea.
Lee said his three daughters in North Korea rejected his offer to flee to South Korea because they feared punishment if caught. Lee said he also has a grandson whose parents — Lee's son and daughter-in-law — died in an accident.
'I'm happy because I've returned to my homeland but I shed tears when I think about them in North Korea,' Lee said during an interview at his home in Gimpo, a city near Seoul.
A total of 80 South Korean POWs have fled to South Korea since 1994, but only seven of them including Lee are still alive. In 2016, the South Korean government estimated about 500 South Korean POWs were still alive in North Korea.
North Korean daughter fights for her late South Korean POW dad
Son Myong Hwa, 63, is the North Korea-born daughter of a South Korean POW held in the North. She said her father sang and played the harmonica well but often drank alone at home and wept.
Son's father, who also worked as a miner in North Korea, died of lung cancer in 1984. Son said he left a will asking her to move his ashes to his South Korean hometown when the Koreas are unified.
Son escaped to South Korea in 2005 and brought her father's remains to South Korea with the help of her brother and sister in North Korea in 2013. Her father's remains were eventually buried at the national cemetery. But Son said her demand for the government to give her father's compensation to her has gone unanswered because South Korean law only grants financial assistance to returning POWs, not their bereaved families.
Son has been fighting legal battles to get what she thinks she deserves. She said she can't back down now because she has lost too many things. She said she learned that her brother and sister involved in the smuggling of their father's remains were later arrested by North Korean authorities and sent to a prison camp. The trouble has left Son estranged from her two other sisters who also resettled in South Korea.
'Why am I struggling like this? I harbor ill feeling against the South Korean government because I think they've abandoned POWs left in North Korea,' Son said. 'I think deceased POWs also have honors to be respected so their compensation must be provided posthumously.'
South Korean son flies balloons for his father abducted to North
In 1967, when Choi Sung-Yong was 15, his father was abducted by North Korean agents, whose armed vessels encircled his fishing boat near the Koreas' disputed western sea boundary.
Choi said that South Korean officials and a North Korean defector told him that his father was executed in the early 1970s after North Korean interrogators uncovered his wartime service for a U.S. intelligence military unit.
Choi said his family still doesn't hold an annual traditional memorial service for his father because they don't know exactly when he died. He said before his mother died in 2005, she asked him to bring his father's remains and bury them alongside hers in the future.
Now, as head of a civic group representing families of people kidnapped by North Korea, Choi flies balloons across the border to drop leaflets demanding that North Korea confirm the fates of his father and others.
'I want to hear directly from North Korea about my father,' Choi said.
The South Korean government estimates more than 500 South Korean kidnap victims, mostly fishermen, are still held in North Korea.
Choi faces police investigations after the new liberal South Korean government cracked down on civilian leafleting campaigns to ease tensions with North Korea.
Choi said Tuesday that senior South Korean officials told him they would strive to resolve the abduction issue as they asked him to halt balloon activities that it views as a major provocation.
'Our government has failed to fulfill their duties to find the fate of my father. So I've sent leaflets. But why do South Korean authorities try to punish me?' Choi said. 'Criminals are in North Korea.'
South Korean hoping to meet his North Korean half-siblings
When Kang Min-do's family gathered for major traditional holidays, he said his North Korea-born father often wept quietly when he honored the two other children he lost during the chaos of the Korean War.
Kang, who was born to a woman his father remarried in South Korea, said his father told him bombings, likely from U.S. warplanes, scattered his family somewhere near Pyongyang in January 1951 as they were fleeing to South Korea.
'My father said he tried to search for them after the bombing ended, but bodies were piled so high and he just couldn't find anyone,' Kang, 67, said.
Before he died in 1992, Kang's father hoped that his son would find his half-siblings one day to tell them how much their father missed them. In a video message posted on a South Korean government website, Kang expressed hopes of visiting his father's grave with his half-brother and half-sister when the Koreas are united.
'I need to tell them how much our father struggled after coming to the South and how deeply he missed his older son and daughter," Kang said.
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Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Horror of the Korean War revealed by 'forgotten' British veterans 75 years on: Bridges made from corpses, troops fighting without guns and Chinese soldiers blowing themselves up
Ken Keld is sitting in the lounge of his immaculate one-bed bungalow outside Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Aged 91, he is a gentle and softly spoken Yorkshireman who still walks a mile a day. Given his warmth, it is hard to place him into the events he is describing. 'The shelling seemed to stop dead, you could have heard a pin drop. Within seconds they're there on top of us, we're outnumbered five to one,' he says. 'They were fanatics, they'd jump in the trenches and blow themselves up. It was hand-to-hand combat, it was practically every man for himself'. The great grandfather-of-two is a veteran of the Korean War, a conflict which, over the course of three years, claimed the lives of 1,100 British soldiers - more than in the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the war, MailOnline has tracked down Ken and two other British veterans of the war. All in their 90s, their stories shed light on a horrific conflict seldom taught in schools and one which, despite the enormous sacrifice of ordinary British conscripts, is nicknamed the 'Forgotten War'. Many young men who had been sent to fight were only there because of compulsory National Service; some were still teenagers. Ken Keld, 91, is a veteran of the Korean War. He spoke to MailOnline from his home in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. He remembers how Chinese soldiers would jump in trenches and 'blow themselves up' By the end of the war, up to three million civilians had been killed. But historians generally view the conflict as one of the major success stories for the West in the post-War era; defending democracy and ensuring the safety of the South Korean people. Sir Michael Caine's memories of fighting in the Korean War Sir Michael Caine was called up to fight in the Korean War after enlisting for compulsory National Service. He recalled his experiences in an interview with the Daily Mail in 1987. Commenting on the tactics employed by the enemy, he told of 'attack after attack, you would find their bodies in groups of four'. 'We heard them talking and we knew they had sussed us…Our officer shouted run and by chance we ran towards the Chinese. Which is what saved us; in the dark we lost each other,' he added. The actor, now 92, went on: 'I remember the boredom and the bull. 'I also remember the sheer naked terror of finding that I, a kid from the Elephant and Castle, actually had to go out into a paddy field, at night, while Chinese soldiers were trying to kill me.' At the end of the Second World War, Korea – previously occupied by the Japanese – was divided along the 38th parallel, an internal border between North and South based on a circle of latitude. Determined to bring the entire Korean peninsula under communist rule, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea and grandfather of tyrant Kim Jon Un, invaded the South on the 25th June 1950. With the support of the Soviet Union and later, China, whose maniac dictator Chairman Mao saw the conflict as a threat to his own security, soldiers poured over the border as a United Nations coalition of 21 countries rallied behind the South's Republic of Korea Army (ROKA). The invaders quickly took the capital Seoul before a back-and-forth that would see both sides gain and lose territory in chaotic seesaw fashion. By August, British naval personnel and troops were on the ground supporting the US army. 'I'd never been abroad... there was a Cockney on my ship who had never seen the sea before', says fellow 91-year-old Mike Mogridge from his home in Henley, Oxfordshire, as he recalls his eight-week journey by ship to Korea. Peckham-born and bred, Mike had been called up for National Service by the Tower of London-based Royal Fusiliers in early 1952. Among his fellow recruits were East End gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who Mike knew from the boxing world. After storming out one day, the twins would go on to be dishonourably discharged from National Service. A certain Michael Caine found himself in the same regiment as Mike, too. In early 1953, following six weeks' training in Hong Kong and a stint at Pusan (modern day Busan) in South Korea, Mike - now aged 19 - found himself on The Hook, a strategic area near Panmunjom so named for its shape. There, British, American, Canadian, Turkish, Thai and Republic of Korea Army (Roka) forces had been facing down the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA). Conditions were horrific. While winters plunged to -40°C, summers could hit 40C. As the bodies of dead Chinese and allied soldiers lay on the battlefield, the rats moved in. 'When you go to sleep, it was overrun with rats', Mike, who still goes to the gym three times a week, recalls. 'At first you'd brush them off, eventually you didn't bother, they were very big rats because they were feeding off the dead bodies.' Korea was a war fought largely at night, with fairly uneventful patrols into no-man's-land where the enemy would occasionally open up on their positions. Days were spent dodging mortar and sniper fire, which the allies returned with devastating effect. Artillery was the game of Brian Parritt. A 2nd Lieutenant of the 20th Field Regiment in the Royal Artillery, he had joined the Army in 1949 and passed out of Sandhurst in February 1952. Having arrived in Korea that December, Brian was tasked with shelling enemy positions across The Hook. Located on a back line, his artillery pummeled the Chinese with VT shells that would explode above ground and devastate units of Chinese soldiers. Brian, now 94, was Mentioned in Despatches for his exploits on The Hook, a map of which hangs in his house. It is stained with his own blood following a mine incident that killed three men and blew him into the air. But Brian is keen to downplay his role in Korea. He instead highlights his superiors, three of whom had served in the Second World War and, as luck would have it, were sent to Korea just five years after the end of the war. 'They'd tell the men, "you think this is tough, son? You should've seen Normandy"', Brian recalls. He adds: 'There was great respect for them, there is no bull******** when you know your Sergeant Major had fought his way from El-Alamein, up through Italy and on to Monte Cassino.' Conditions were tough, Brian admits. 'It was bloody cold. By the time you made a cup of tea and raised it to your lips, it would get stuck to them,' he said. When a Chinese defector called Hua Hong, who had once fought against Chairman Mao's Chinese forces as a sergeant in Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist army, was captured by allied soldiers, he revealed how a major offensive to take The Hook was being planned by the PVA. 'He knew everything, all the details of the attack, apart from the date', Brian says from an office filled with ephemera from a 37-year career in the Army. The Chinese, who had already been practicing the attack, had tried twice in the autumn of 1952 to seize The Hook but failed after being held back first by the US Marines, then by the legendary Scots of The Black Watch. It was during those battles where the allies witnessed the true horror of Chinese 'human waves', sent forward in their thousands to be mowed down before more elite units would follow through. Some of those in the first waves were unarmed and, when killed, were used as corpse bridges over barbed wire by the units which followed behind. 'When the Chinese attack, they come in three waves, one to destroy, one to take and one to hold, with tremendous numerical strength, and our artillery start to shell them... They lost hundreds before they even got to us', Mike grimly remembers. Following Hong's revelation of a third planned offensive, the allies were prepared for what was to come. It is estimated that around 9,000 PVA shells hammered allied positions on The Hook between May 19th and 28th. The allies returned as many in a volley of artillery which devastated the land. Ken Keld and his comrades from the Duke of Wellington's Regiment had been sent up to the frontline to relieve the Black Watch earlier that month. In position, he was the forward most platoon at The Hook. 'We were the ones going in first', he says. At around 8pm on May 28, 1953, following days of shelling by the PVA and the allies, the battlefield fell silent. In the distance, the sound of Chinese bugles rang out. That only meant one thing. As Ken, then 19, looked up from his position, he could see wave upon wave of Chinese soldiers coming towards him. Moments later, 'all hell broke loose'. 'There were just waves of them coming... The tanks would put on their spotlights and you could see Chinese running down hillside, so they started on them with the machine gun', he says. 'The Chinese didn't all have weapons, they picked weapons up from someone who had been killed.' At the back of the battle, Brian was pounding the Chinese positions with artillery fire. 'It was a most intense battle', says Brian, 'the barrels of the guns were red hot. 'Someone put a damp towel over a gun and it caught fire, it was an exhilarating experience'. As the Chinese edged closer, the fighting became more and more vicious. Ken, while holding them off, was running out of ammunition. Within moments, the Chinese had stormed his trench. 'We were in the trenches and they were just dropping in, they're blowing themselves up and whoever's with them... our number two Bren gunner Mick Connor was just mowing 'em down until he was killed himself.' 'It was practically every man for himself, it was more or less back-to-back, covering up for your other man, it was chaos.' Ken was pushed back into the tunnels which had been dug by the Black Watch before the Chinese ordered their surrender, promising good treatment. Recounting what the Britons replied to the surrender demand, Ken laughs and says: 'The second word was "off".' 'We were in there when they blew the ends in, all you could hear was thumping of things, Chinese voices, all you are thinking about is how long we're going to be here, are we going to be eating rice three times a day as prisoners!' With Ken and his comrades buried alive in the tunnel with just a Sten gun and one grenade, the Duke's outside launched a heroic counter offensive on the Chinese trenches. By 3.30am, they had taken control of The Hook. It was a resounding victory but one which had come at a devastating cost. By the end of the Battle of The Hook, just 17 out of 45 men in Ken's Duke of Wellington's platoon had survived. Among the dead was his friend from back home in Yorkshire, Dennis Smith, aged just 19, whom he points out in his 'In Memoriam' book. Around 2,000 PVA soldiers had been killed or wounded in just seven hours of human wave attacks and suicide missions. The Hook was a 'mess', Ken says, adding: 'We were offered a meal but there were so many bodies we didn't want it. 'The worst of all was the stench, buried, decayed, limbs and bodies. There had been so much fighting, it was like being sent to death row.' Ken was sent to a rear position following the battle of The Hook and Mike's Royal Fusiliers - who had been at the battle but in a rear position - took over. A month later on July 27, the truce, now known as The Korean War Armistice, was signed at Panmunjom, where the modern-day Demilitarized Zone now stands separating North and South Korea. When news of the truce got out, Brian heard the Fusiliers in their trenches singing Vera Lynn's 'There Will Always Be an England'. The rest of the battlefield soon joined in. As well as the 1,100 British dead, there were 3,000 wounded, and more than 1,000 missing or taken prisoner. For all of the horrors of Korea, the three men hold no hatred towards their former enemy. For Ken - who in 2023 received an MBE for his work with Korean War veterans - he respects the bravery of the Chinese on the battlefield, noting that on balance they were 'good soldiers'. For Brian, humanity shone through when, towards the end of the war, he met two Chinese soldiers in no-man's-land. They shook hands and took photos. He says: 'Having seen the consequences of war, I believe in jaw jaw before war war".' For a former Brigadier who spent nearly four decades in the Army, and whose service in Cyprus and Northern Ireland with the Intelligence Corps earned him an MBE and CBE respectively, it is a seismic comment. Korea, for Brian, was a resounding success and a victory which is still appreciated by South Koreans to this day. But it was the reception that met British soldiers on their return to Britain in 1956 that all three men struggled with. Mike, whose TV presenter daughter Fiona McLean starred in Grange Hill and whose son later joined the Army, explained: 'When I got back my father took me for a pint at our local, I remember one of his mates asking me "where have you been?" 'I told him I'd been in Korea, and he said, "oh, did you have a nice time?" And that was that.' Ken feels much the same about the 'forgotten' nature of Korea and the sacrifice made by ordinary Brits, many of whom were teenagers on National Service. He says: 'We had to pay for our own memorial, £40,000. You can't understand it. We've had to fight for everything to get recognition. I was getting shot at for a quid a week.' It is accepted among the three men that Korea became a forgotten war in part due it's sheer distance from Britain - 5,600 miles - but also thanks to a fatigue present amongst Britons so soon after the fight against Hitler. 'The appetite for more war was just not there', Mike admits. Brian, who is the only British soldier to be awarded the Order of Civil Merit (Moran) medal by South Korea, concludes: 'You'll go round the world looking at gravestones, a lot of them young National Service boys and there's a feeling, what the hell were we doing there? 'In historical terms it is not recognised what the army did in the post-War period. 'I do feel that in this period that the British Army tried to move from Colonialism to independence. I don't feel that is recognised.
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
POWs, abductees, defectors and separated families are the legacy of the Korean War
Prisoners of war held for decades after the fighting stopped. Civilian abductees. Defectors. Separated families. They are Koreans who symbolize the decades of division and bitter animosities between North and South Korea, which have been split by a heavily fortified border since the the 1950-53 Korean War. Koreans aren't allowed to exchange visits, phone calls or letters with their loved ones on the other side. Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the war's beginning. The Associated Press spoke with Koreans whose pain and sorrow likely won't be healed anytime soon as diplomacy between the Koreas remains dormant. South Korean prisoner of war isolated after his return home Lee Seon-wu, who was a South Korean soldier, lost three fingers and was captured by Chinese troops during a fierce battle in the eastern Gangwon province in the final days of the war. Like tens of thousands of other South Korean prisoners, Lee was held by North Korea even after a peace treaty ended the fighting. He was forced to resettle as a miner in the country's remote northeast. In North Korea, Lee said he belonged to the lowest social class and married a poor woman. He also lived under constant state surveillance. In 2006, he fled to South Korea via China, only to learn that his parents and two of his three siblings had already died. Lee said he was shunned by his nephew, who likely worried Lee would demand the return of land that was originally bought with compensation money that authorities gave to his family after they wrongly concluded that Lee had died in the war. Now 94, he doesn't stay in touch with any relatives in South Korea and misses family members in North Korea. Lee said his three daughters in North Korea rejected his offer to flee to South Korea because they feared punishment if caught. Lee said he also has a grandson whose parents — Lee's son and daughter-in-law — died in an accident. 'I'm happy because I've returned to my homeland but I shed tears when I think about them in North Korea,' Lee said during an interview at his home in Gimpo, a city near Seoul. A total of 80 South Korean POWs have fled to South Korea since 1994, but only seven of them including Lee are still alive. In 2016, the South Korean government estimated about 500 South Korean POWs were still alive in North Korea. North Korean daughter fights for her late South Korean POW dad Son Myong Hwa, 63, is the North Korea-born daughter of a South Korean POW held in the North. She said her father sang and played the harmonica well but often drank alone at home and wept. Son's father, who also worked as a miner in North Korea, died of lung cancer in 1984. Son said he left a will asking her to move his ashes to his South Korean hometown when the Koreas are unified. Son escaped to South Korea in 2005 and brought her father's remains to South Korea with the help of her brother and sister in North Korea in 2013. Her father's remains were eventually buried at the national cemetery. But Son said her demand for the government to give her father's compensation to her has gone unanswered because South Korean law only grants financial assistance to returning POWs, not their bereaved families. Son has been fighting legal battles to get what she thinks she deserves. She said she can't back down now because she has lost too many things. She said she learned that her brother and sister involved in the smuggling of their father's remains were later arrested by North Korean authorities and sent to a prison camp. The trouble has left Son estranged from her two other sisters who also resettled in South Korea. 'Why am I struggling like this? I harbor ill feeling against the South Korean government because I think they've abandoned POWs left in North Korea,' Son said. 'I think deceased POWs also have honors to be respected so their compensation must be provided posthumously.' South Korean son flies balloons for his father abducted to North In 1967, when Choi Sung-Yong was 15, his father was abducted by North Korean agents, whose armed vessels encircled his fishing boat near the Koreas' disputed western sea boundary. Choi said that South Korean officials and a North Korean defector told him that his father was executed in the early 1970s after North Korean interrogators uncovered his wartime service for a U.S. intelligence military unit. Choi said his family still doesn't hold an annual traditional memorial service for his father because they don't know exactly when he died. He said before his mother died in 2005, she asked him to bring his father's remains and bury them alongside hers in the future. Now, as head of a civic group representing families of people kidnapped by North Korea, Choi flies balloons across the border to drop leaflets demanding that North Korea confirm the fates of his father and others. 'I want to hear directly from North Korea about my father,' Choi said. The South Korean government estimates more than 500 South Korean kidnap victims, mostly fishermen, are still held in North Korea. Choi faces police investigations after the new liberal South Korean government cracked down on civilian leafleting campaigns to ease tensions with North Korea. Choi said Tuesday that senior South Korean officials told him they would strive to resolve the abduction issue as they asked him to halt balloon activities that it views as a major provocation. 'Our government has failed to fulfill their duties to find the fate of my father. So I've sent leaflets. But why do South Korean authorities try to punish me?' Choi said. 'Criminals are in North Korea.' South Korean hoping to meet his North Korean half-siblings When Kang Min-do's family gathered for major traditional holidays, he said his North Korea-born father often wept quietly when he honored the two other children he lost during the chaos of the Korean War. Kang, who was born to a woman his father remarried in South Korea, said his father told him bombings, likely from U.S. warplanes, scattered his family somewhere near Pyongyang in January 1951 as they were fleeing to South Korea. 'My father said he tried to search for them after the bombing ended, but bodies were piled so high and he just couldn't find anyone,' Kang, 67, said. Before he died in 1992, Kang's father hoped that his son would find his half-siblings one day to tell them how much their father missed them. In a video message posted on a South Korean government website, Kang expressed hopes of visiting his father's grave with his half-brother and half-sister when the Koreas are united. 'I need to tell them how much our father struggled after coming to the South and how deeply he missed his older son and daughter," Kang said.
BBC News
11 hours ago
- BBC News
South Korea banned dog meat. So what happens to the dogs?
When he isn't preaching the word of God, Reverend Joo Yeong-bong is raising dogs for is not going well though. In fact, it's on the brink of becoming illegal. "Since last summer we've been trying to sell our dogs, but the traders just keep hesitating," Mr Joo, 60, tells the BBC. "Not a single one has shown up."In 2024, the South Korean government implemented a nationwide ban on the sale of dog meat for consumption. The landmark legislation, which was passed last January, gives farmers like Mr Joo until February 2027 to shutter their operations and sell off their remaining many say that isn't enough time to phase out an industry which has propped up livelihoods for generations – and that authorities still haven't come up with adequate safeguards for farmers or the estimated half a million dogs in captivity. Even those who support the ban, including experts and animal rights advocates, have flagged issues around its enforcement – including the difficulty of rehoming dogs that, having been saved from the kill floor, now face the increasingly likely threat of euthanasia. Midway through the grace period, dog farmers are finding themselves with hundreds of virtually unsellable animals, farms that can't be closed, and little means of putting food on the table."People are suffering," says Mr Joo, who is also president of the Korean Association of Edible Dogs, a group representing the industry. "We're drowning in debt, can't pay it off, and some can't even... find new work. "It's a hopeless situation." A storm of obstacles Chan-woo has 18 months to get rid of 600 that, the 33-year-old meat farmer – who we agreed to anonymise for fear of backlash – faces a penalty of up to two years in prison."Realistically, even just on my farm, I can't process the number of dogs I have in that time," he says. "At this point I've invested all of my assets [into the farm] - and yet they are not even taking the dogs."By "they", Chan-woo doesn't just mean the traders and butchers who, prior to the ban, would buy an average of half a dozen dogs per week. He's also referring to the animal rights activists and authorities who in his view, having fought so hard to outlaw the dog meat trade, have no clear plan for what to do with the leftover animals – of which there are close to 500,000, according to government estimates."They [the authorities] passed the law without any real plan, and now they're saying they can't even take the dogs." Lee Sangkyung, a campaign manager at Humane World for Animals Korea (Hwak), echoes these concerns."Although the dog meat ban has passed, both the government and civic groups are still grappling with how to rescue the remaining dogs," he says. "One area that still feels lacking is the discussion around the dogs that have been left behind."A spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (Mafra) told the BBC that if farm owners gave up their dogs, local governments would assume ownership and manage them in them, however, has proven weight equals profit in the dog meat industry, farms tend to favour larger breeds. But in South Korea's highly urbanised society, where many people live in apartment complexes, aspiring pet owners often want the is also a social stigma associated with dogs that come from meat farms, Mr Lee explains, due to concerns of disease and trauma. The issue is further complicated by the fact that many are either pure or mixed tosa-inu, a breed that is classified as "dangerous" in South Korea and requires government approval to keep as a rescue shelters are already perfect storm of obstacles points to a perverse irony: that countless so-called rescue dogs, with nowhere else to go, now face the prospect of being euthanised. "It's just unbelievable," says Chan-woo. "Since the law was made according to the demands of these groups, I assumed they had also worked out a solution for the dogs - like they would take responsibility for them. But now I hear that even the animal rights groups say euthanasia is the only option."Cho Hee-kyung, head of the Korean Animal Welfare Association, conceded in September 2024 that while rights groups would try to rescue as many animals as possible, there would "be dogs left over"."If remaining dogs become 'lost and abandoned animals' then it's heartbreaking but they will be euthanised," she government sought to temper these concerns weeks later, saying that euthanising animals was "certainly" not part of their plan. More recently, Mafra told the BBC it was investing about 6bn Korean won ($4.3m; £3.2m) annually to expand animal shelters and support private facilities, and would offer up to 600,000 Korean won per dog ($450; £324) to farmers who shut their businesses early. But Chun Myung-Sun, director of the Office of Veterinary Medical Education at Seoul National University, agrees that the government's broader plan for leftover dogs is largely lacking."There needs to be a concrete discussion about how to 'dispose' of the dogs," she says."Both adoption and euthanasia should be on the table. [But] if we've gone to the effort of rescuing dogs from cruel slaughter only to euthanise them, it's understandable that people would feel heartbroken and angry." A livelihood unravels Some have looked for solutions further afield, sending the animals overseas to more willing adopters in countries like Canada, United Kingdom and the United 2023, a team from Hwak rescued some 200 dogs from a farm in Asan city – all of which have since been sent to Canada and the former owner of that farm, 74-year-old Yang Jong-tae, told the BBC that as he watched the rescuers loading his dogs into their trucks, he was astonished by the level of compassion they showed."When I saw how they handled the animals - like they were handling people, so gently and lovingly - it really moved me," he said."We don't treat them like that. For us, raising dogs was just a way to make a living. But those people from the animal group treated the dogs like they were individuals with dignity, and that really touched my heart." Mr Yang hastened to add, however, that he disapproves of the ban on dog meat farming."If dog meat is banned because dogs are animals, then why is it okay to eat other animals like cows, pigs or chicken?" he said. "It's the same thing. These things exist in nature for people to live on."Eating dog is not the same as eating other meats, according to Ms Chun. She points out that dog meat carries more risk from a food safety and hygiene perspective - especially in South Korea, where it has not been integrated into the formal, regulated meat production while consumption rates have fluctuated throughout Korea's history, it has become increasingly taboo in recent years.A government poll from 2024 found only 8% of respondents said they had tried dog meat in the previous 12 months – down from 27% in 2015. About 7% said they would keep eating it up until February 2027, and about 3.3% said they would continue after the ban came into full as of June 2025, 623 of South Korea's 1,537 dog farms had closed."As society and culture have evolved, South Korean society has now made the decision to stop producing dog meat," Ms Chun says. And yet for many it remains the cornerstone of an industry on which they've built their member of the dog meat trade the BBC spoke to expressed uncertainty about how they would support themselves now that their longtime livelihood has been deemed say they have resigned themselves to lives of poverty, noting that they were born during the Korean War and knew how to live hungry. Others suggested that the trade could go agree, however, that for younger farmers the crackdown is particularly worrying."Young people in this industry are really facing a bleak reality," Mr Joo says. "Since they can't sell the dogs, they can't shut down quickly either. They're stuck, with no way forward or back."Chan-woo recalls that when he started working in the industry a decade ago, at 23, "The perception of dog meat wasn't that negative"."Still," he adds, "There were some comments from people around me, so even back then I was aware that it wasn't something I could do for the rest of my life."The ban came quicker than he expected – and since its announcement, he says, "Making a living has become incredibly uncertain"."All we're hoping for now is that the grace period can be extended so that the process [of dealing with the remaining dogs] can happen more gradually."Many others are hoping for the same. But as the dog meat industry is pulled out from under the feet of those who've come to depend upon it, Mr Joo can't help but speculate on a grim thought: that some farmers may not be able to endure the uncertainty for much longer."Right now, people are still holding on, hoping something might change – maybe the grace period will be extended," he says. "But by 2027, I truly believe something terrible will happen."There are so many people whose lives have completely unravelled."
