NEWS AND COMMENT-OSAN AIR BASE, SOUTH KOREA: The Korea Herald reports that, in December 2021, more than 10 feral cats were shot and killed by US troops with air guns on Osan Air Base. The South Korean broadcaster KBS presented a video which showed a military employee shooting a pellet from a rifle at the head of a cat in a cage. In the footage a man is interviewed in which he said: “The harmful animal handling team shot the (captive) cat. They didn’t care whether the cat was sick, injured, old or nursing.”
It appears that the alleged incident has caused embarrassment to the American military because they’ve stopped doing it. They started to get rid of feral cats this way in July 2021. From April 2021 the pest management team, as they are called, took the stray cats to a veterinarian on the base where there were euthanised. It appears to me, by the way, that these were community cats by which I mean semi-domesticated feral cats.
The change from euthanasia to what appears to be illegal shooting occurred because euthanasia drugs are expensive and the veterinarian or veterinarians doing the euthanasia were traumatised, according to the informant.
If the report is correct that the veterinarian carrying out the euthanasia was traumatised it begs the question as to how they dealt with it. Perhaps the veterinarian objected and resisted euthanising healthy cats. This may have encouraged the military to shoot them instead. How did the veterinarian react to that news, I wonder?
A spokesperson at the base said that the cat killings were carried out according to the rules. A non-profit organisation involved in the rescue of laboratory animals, Beagle Rescue Network, had been investigating the shooting of cats at the base for two months after they were tipped off. They secured videos and photos to prove the killings and sent the evidence to the Korean government as well as to the broadcaster.
A spokesperson for that organisation said: “Such practice clearly constitutes animal cruelty under law and the domestic animal protection law strictly prohibits ‘acts that lead to death in a cruel way'”.
I was prompted to look up the animal welfare and protection legislation of South Korea. We are told that it is weak legislation and badly enforced. I would expect that sending the evidence to the government would result in nothing happening.
Although, the law is not worded badly. It seems to be more a matter of failure to enforce it. The Animal Protection Act and the Wildfire Protection and Management Act prohibit killing wild animals by cruel methods. It also protects the killing of domestic cats in the same way on my understanding of it.
Animal protection laws in the West would regard shooting stray cats in the head with an air pellet as animal cruelty, quite certainly. And therefore, I would expect the South Korea law to come to the same conclusion.
South Korea has a bad reputation for animal cruelty. Simply look at the dog and cat meat trade which is a major concern for South Korean animal activists. Over 2 million dogs are consumed annually. Sometimes pet dogs are stolen and sold into the trade and killed brutally. Sometimes pet cats are killed in the same way.
How does this cruel cat and dog meat trade escape the animal protection laws of South Korea? Hardly a great reputation for animal welfare.
Below are some pages on cat and dog meat in the form of a slideshow. Please click on the images to go to the page.
Thank you, Jon, for the information. I will certainly follow up on that and report back to you. It does interest me. I am always interested in puma information.
Dear Michael, I have news, not a comment, but I don’t know how else to contact you. Saturday Morning, May 28th, 2022 a young girl was attacked by a Cougar in my State. Near Fruitland, WA, coincidentally near where my Todd great-grandfather built a house on his ranch. She’s recovering, but is in the hospital. I downloaded an article about it, but unfortunately my computer (laptop) won’t let me attach downloads to
e-mails anymore, probably more malware from Microsoft’s “updates”(They want me to buy apps from them to do what I was able to do for free). It’s academic, as I don’t have an e-mail address for you anyway. But, as I said, I couldn’t send it anymore anyway. I don’t have a printer, but I could go to a copy center and have it printed out & mail it to you via postal(“snail”) mail, but it’d take a while for you to get it, even if I had a P.O. Box or other address for you. I got it from the Fox13(a local Seattle TV station, but it there were also several other articles about it on other sites. Unfortunately, the web address of Fox13 was deleted when I downloaded it. You can probably find it via search engine like I did. I used the terms: cougar AND girl AND Fruitland. I also downloaded an article about the Cougar sighted in Bremerton a while ago I told you about that I remembered. I downloaded it from my local newspaper’s back issue search engine. I didn’t remember exactly when it happened, but it happened in 2018. Let me know whether or not you want me to send you “cougar news” in the future and I will respect your wishes. I’m having so many problems with my laptop lately, and now, it keeps throwing me off my e-mail inbox page (ca.5 times a minute) and any & every other page I try to read or work on, and it opens up pages I never asked for or went anywhere near. It’s taken me over an hour to write this brief note.
I will be sending a link of this post to Joe Biden and the DOD asking them to stop. This really pisses me off. If they have a feral cat problem they could do TNR and eventually the population will go down. The base could also work with a rescue and save the kittens. Once again cats paying the price for people abandoning them! I wonder if other bases are doing this?