‘Notorious’ South Korea Dog Meat Market Shut Down — and More Than 80 Dogs Have Been Saved

Humane Society International first announced in June that the dog meat market, one of the country’s largest, would be shuttered

By Maria Pasquini

July 01, 2019

The Gupo dog meat market in Busan, South Korea, has officially been shut down.

Humane Society International announced on Monday that Gupo — known to animal rights organizations as a “notorious” market, infamous for selling chilled dog meat as well as “live dogs killed to order” — had been shut down by South Korean authorities.

As a result of the closure, over 80 dogs have been saved and are currently being cared for by numerous animal charities, including Humane Society International/Korea, Korean Animal Welfare Association, Korea Animal Rights Advocates and Busan Korean Alliance for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The news comes less than one month after HSI first announced the market would be shut down as the result of an agreement reached by the local Busan authorities and the 19 dog meat sellers operating out of the market.

Once the dog meat market is closed, the government plans to turn the area into a public park as part of an urban planning project, which led to the negotiations for the market’s shutdown.

This latest closure represents another victory in the ongoing fight against the dog meat trade.

South Korea’s Seongnam city demolished the country’s largest dog slaughterhouse in November 2018, and also “closed down most of the related dog meat vendors,” according to HSI.

The organization went on to note that the latest closure is the first-ever “where complete agreement has been reached between the vendors and local authorities.”

“I cannot express enough my joy at helping to close down the dog meat shops and slaughterhouse at Gupo market,” Nara Kim, a dog meat campaigner for HSI and Humane Society Korea, said in a statement.

“The closure of Gupo’s dog meat market means the end of a gruesome era in South Korea’s dog meat history, and a sign of the times that law enforcement and local authorities are cracking down on this increasingly unpopular industry that most Koreans want nothing to do with,” Kim continued. “I know we have a long way to go to end the dog meat trade here, but even two years ago I would never have believed we would see such progress. It has been a pleasure to work with the Busan authorities, and especially in being able to save the last remaining dogs we found alive.”

https://people.com/pets/south-korea-gupo-dog-meat-market-officially-shut-down/

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Pass Resolution for Worldwide Dog Meat Ban. – What About the Rest ?

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We first posted info about the ‘Whale Jail’ in March; long with petition links.

https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2019/06/09/russia-good-news-russia-fines-whale-jail-company-white-whale/

https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2019/03/10/update-100-animals-to-be-released-from-russias-whale-prison/

Well now we have an update – and proof that signing petitions does work; even though you may not think so at the time.

PETITION UPDATE: Russia is Freeing Orcas from Cruel ‘Whale Prison’

Posted by Katie Valentine | June 23, 2019

Last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans to start releasing orcas and beluga whales currently being held in the country’s Far East in crowded pens, nicknamed the “whale jail.”

For the past several months, around 100 whales have been confined in the cramped enclosures off Russia’s Pacific Coast. Disturbing images and videos of the animals were first made public in November of last year, prompting international outrage from animal rights activists and an investigation by Russian authorities.

Those who imprisoned the whales are suspected of planning to sell them to China’s growing amusement park industry, which pays millions of dollars per whale. Following the investigation, four companies were charged for violating a worldwide ban on commercial whale hunting that went into effect in 1982.

In March, Russian authorities announced their intentions to eventually free the whales, citing a need to first figure out how to safely return them to their natural environment. The news was hopeful, but not promising — despite being native to the Arctic, without the ability to keep warm by swimming long distances, the whales’ lives were at risk.

Thanks to global activists’ continued outcry, including the more than 20,000 people who signed LFT’s petition to free the whales, these captive animals are finally getting a chance to live a normal life.

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‘Precipitous’ fall in Antarctic sea ice since 2014 revealed

Plunge is far faster than in Arctic and may lead to more global heating, say scientists

The vast expanse of sea ice around Antarctica has suffered a “precipitous” fall since 2014, satellite data shows, and fell at a faster rate than seen in the Arctic.

The plunge in the average annual extent means Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34 years. The cause of the sharp Antarctic losses is as yet unknown and only time will tell whether the ice recovers or continues to decline.

But researchers said it showed ice could disappear much more rapidly than previously thought. Unlike the melting of ice sheets on land, sea ice melting does not raise sea level. But losing bright white sea ice means the sun’s heat is instead absorbed by dark ocean waters, leading to a vicious circle of heating.

Sea ice spreads over enormous areas and has major impacts on the global climate system, with losses in the Arctic strongly linked to extreme weather at lower latitudes, such as heatwaves in Europe.

The loss of sea ice in the Arctic clearly tracks the rise in global air temperatures resulting from human-caused global heating, but the two poles are very different. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents and is exposed to warming air, while Antarctica is a freezing continent surrounded by oceans and is protected from warming air by a circle of strong winds.

Antarctic sea ice had been slowly increasing during the 40 years of measurements and reached a record maximum in 2014. But since then sea ice extent has nosedived, reaching a record low in 2017.

“There has been a huge decrease,” said Claire Parkinson, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. In her study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she called the decline precipitous and a dramatic reversal.

“We don’t know if that decrease is going to continue,” she said. “But it raises the question of why [has it happened], and are we going to see some huge acceleration in the rate of decrease in the Arctic? Only the continued record will let us know.”

“The Arctic has become a poster child for global warming,” Parkinson said, but the recent sea ice falls in Antarctica have been far worse. She has tracked Antarctic sea ice for more than 40 years. “All of us scientists were thinking eventually global warming is going to catch up in the Antarctic,” she said.

Kaitlin Naughten, a sea ice expert at the British Antarctic Survey, said: “Westerly winds which surround the continent mean that Antarctic sea ice doesn’t respond directly to global warming averaged over the whole planet.”

“Climate change is affecting the winds, but so is the ozone hole and short-term cycles like El Niño. The sea ice is also affected by meltwater running off from the Antarctic ice sheet,” she said. “Until 2014, the total effect of all these factors was for Antarctic sea ice to expand. But in 2014, something flipped, and the sea ice has since declined dramatically. Now scientists are trying to figure out exactly why this happened.”

Prof Andrew Shepherd at Leeds University in the UK said: “The rapid decline has caught us by surprise and changes the picture completely. Now sea ice is retreating in both hemispheres and that presents a challenge because it could mean further warming.” He said it would also be important to find if the ice’s thickness has changed, as well as its extent.

The new research collated microwave satellite data from 1979 to 2018, providing excellent measurements of sea ice as the different signals from ice and ocean are very distinct and microwaves can be detected day or night and usually through clouds.

Sea ice expands in winter and retreats in summer every year, so Parkinson used annual averages to assess the long term trends. The biggest single year fall was in 2016, when an El Niño boosted human-caused warming to result in record global temperatures.

She said rates of decline after 2014 were three times faster than the most rapid melting ever recorded in the Arctic. Sea ice extent had a small uptick in 2018, but in 2019 so far there had been a further reduction, she said.

Parkinson said the dramatic plunge was a strong piece of evidence that scientists could use to narrow down the causes of the change. “As a Nasa scientist, my key responsibility is to get the satellite data out and I hope others will take this 40-year record and try to figure out how these dramatically rapid decreases since 2014 can be explained,” she said.

From: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/precipitous-fall-in-antarctic-sea-ice-revealed

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