S. Korea’s Seongnam Moran Market, “The Mecca of Dog Meat”, is still operating. The Moran Market dog meat trade must be shut down permanently.

A new 2022 undercover investigation by Last Chance for Animals (LCA) and S. Korean sister organization, Animal Liberation Wave (ALW), has exposed the illegal trafficking of dogs that are auctioned and slaughtered for the Seongnam Moran Dog Meat Market.

The 5-month investigation, conducted between February - June 2022, revealed the trafficking of pet dogs into the meat trade by “middle merchants”  that travel by truck across S. Korea. These middle merchants buy pet dogs from households, churches and factories that are first sold at dog meat auction houses, then secretly electrocuted in nearby slaughterhouses.

The meat from these slaughtered dogs is sold by vendors located in the Moran Market.

LCA and ALW confirmed there are still 10 shops that sell dog meat or “Bosintang” (dog meat soup), in Moran Market. Behind the scenes, there is a nationwide network of middle merchants, illegal slaughterhouses, illegal auction houses and farms.

Seongnam City has a long history of promising to end dog meat in Moran Market.

In 2016, Seongnam City signed a 'Memorandum of Understanding for Environmental Maintenance of the Moran Market' with the Moran Livestock Market Merchants Association and started to eliminate the practice of displaying and slaughtering live dogs in the market.

In 2018, the city announced that “dog slaughter in the Seongnam Moran Market has disappeared into history” and promised that it will “continue to facilitate the transition of vendors so that the distribution of dog meat within the market completely disappears”.

In May 2022, Seongnam Mayor Shin Sang-jin announced he would “modernize the Moran Market so that it becomes a prestigious one visited by the people all over the country”.

However, the sale of dog meat still continues at Moran Market.

In July 2021, LCA & ALW released an investigation that also proved dog meat sold in the market  had been illegally slaughtered ‘outside the market’,  violating clauses 1) acts that cause death in a cruel way and 2) acts that cause death in front of other animals of the same kind of Article 8(1) of the Animal Protection Act.

Activities in both investigations are in violation of numerous clauses of the Animal Protection Act, the Building Act, the National Land Planning and Utilization Act and the Food Sanitation Act.

Mayor Shin Sang-jin: I urge you to take all possible measures to permanently shut down the notorious dog meat trade in Moran Market that continues to exist.