Unbelievable but true: South Korea still thinks that thare is no other solution than dispose infected poultry by dumping them in deep holes and burry the chickens alive without stunning or culling them first.

1. Why is animal cruelty in February 2014 still front-page news in South Korea??
By: Harm Kiezebrink, Project manager N2GF
project
Unbelievable but true: Ever since the
first large-scale outbreaks began in
October 1997, outbreaks are handled
in Asia like there would be no other
solution than dumping the animals in
big holes and burry them alive.
Is this the result of bad planning, with
contingency plans that only exist on
paper. With European countries
sending experts over to investigate
and come up with the next Lessonslearnt report, hoping that things will be handled in the future.
Well, let me be perfectly clear, the response to outbreaks in South Korea is not
getting better,nor is it improving. With complicating factors of more people, who all
want to have a higher lifestyle and thus – an ever-growing population of farm
animals are needed, housed on a small area, close to the Soya harbor.
Yesterday it was in the Korean news that Korea still uses the method of mass burial
of chickens. Despite that this is absolutely unnecessary. 10 years ago, I started to
develop the Anoxia method, a culling method that is cheap and 100% effective,
without unnecessary human intervention and without any unnecessary stress or
pain for the animal. The technique has been tested and approved and is today the
most welfare friendly culling technique available. It is since 2013 on the market and
commercially available.
To see how it works, go to http://n2gf.com/?p=808
To see what the effect of Anoxia is to humans, see: http://n2gf.com/?p=1110
To read the text of the proof of principle for the Anoxia method, go to:
http://n2gf.com/?p=1037
The information about the Anoxia method is available online for more than 1 year
and articles related to the introduction of this technique has been published on
several websites (check out N2GF.com for more animal welfare related information)
and social media platforms. Experts and specialists worldwide have downloaded the
online presentations, related articles and documents about culling and slaughter of
animals more than 35.000 times. This makes the question even more intriguing why
it looks like nothing has changed. And it is not the first time that South Korea made it
to the front page when it comes to animal cruelty and culling animals.

2. Huffington Post Online January 2011
To put this picture of 2014 into perspective, I recall an article from the Huffington
post, published online at January 2011:
When a disease outbreak strikes animal agribusiness, here is South Korea’s method
for dealing with the problem: they dig an enormous hole, dump live animals into it by
the thousands, and use excavators to push the dirt back over it. Over the past two
months, to combat a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, the country has killed more
than a million pigs in this way.
Additionally, South Korea also ordered the
killing of just over 100,000 cattle. As it set
about killing all these cattle, the
government showed staggering
incompetence: it procured an anesthetic
that can kill when injected in large amounts,
but ran out partway through this effort—
and proceeded to bury the remaining cattle
alive.
In addition to the foot and mouth outbreak,
avian flu has simultaneously descended on
South Korea. And yet again, the country has
responded by burying the animals alive: 2.7
million live birds have so far been bagged
and buried.
(photo © 경인일보 kyeongin.com)
If you consider animal agribusiness a desirable thing, then the bird cull can probably
only be looked at as a necessary public health measure. There is, after all, no vaccine
that could protect these birds from swiftly-mutating avian flu.
And if the virus went on to infect many or most of the chickens in Korea, it would gain
the opportunity to jump the species barrier and unleash the scenario every public
health expert fears: a deadly, highly contagious human flu that could kill many
millions of people.
Yet there’s no reason why burying animals alive should ever be regarded as an
ethically acceptable choice. Between the use of an euthanasia drug and the time
needed to make an injection, it needn’t cost much more than fifty cents per chicken
to kill each animal prior to burial. So this is really a matter of South Korea and its
factory farmers being unwilling to pony up about a million dollars for the sake of
sparing these chickens the most horrific of deaths.
Where the pigs were concerned, the situation is even more unforgivable. In essence,
the mass killing was a direct result of the government gambling that they could
cheaply end the foot-and-mouth outbreak by killing just 12 percent of its pig

3. population, rather than inoculate each of the country’s millions of pigs for against
the disease. When this limited cull failed, it forced the government’s hand and they
issued orders to begin a mass killing.
It’s not as if South Korea can claim they were caught off-guard and lacked time to
prepare. They’d twice dodged catastrophe earlier in 2010, in January and again in
April, by nipping two outbreaks in the bud—at the cost of killing 56,000 animals.
What this means is that prior to the re-emergence of foot-and-mouth in late
November, the government had at least a seven-month window of opportunity to
implement a vaccination program throughout its livestock industry. Instead, it
decided to roll the dice, and more than 1.4 million pigs and cattle have now been
brutally killed and discarded as a consequence.
Unlike the United States and Britain, which have large and influential animal
protection groups with the clout required to ban the most extreme animal abuses,
there are no comparable groups in South Korea. So, despite the fact that South Korea
is a member of the World Organization for Animal Health, the country has ignored
the group’s guidelines forbidding the burial of live animals (Chapter 7.6, Killing of
animals for disease control purposes, Article 7.6.1, Terrestrial Animal Health Code.)
So what we have in South Korea is a country whose leadership is incapable of acting
with any decency where farmed animals are concerned. We’ve got no prospect of
change from within, since the country lacks animal charities with the power to force
quick reforms. And, given that little mainstream reporting has so far occurred, there’s
little chance of international condemnation forcing Korea to remedy these abuses.
Stephen Bant of Korea Animal Rights Advocates describes the animals’ ordeal:
“In the current cull, as in previous years, pigs in the back of trucks are simply tipped
into a pit. These animals, many fully grown, would fall up to 4-5 meters into the hole
only to have other pigs landing on top of them. We can assume that many are
injured, perhaps with broken bones, or killed in the process. Hundreds of pigs would
be crammed into the same hole. At other times pigs are herded near holes, then push
in with excavator arms.
The animals are being buried alive at such a furious pace—about four million so far—
that some rural Koreans are turning on their taps to find bloody water pouring from
their pipes.
What we are witnessing in South Korea is unconscionable animal cruelty occurring on
a massive scale, and no reliable way to prevent repeat this scenario from playing out
again in the future. It’s a situation the entire world is ethically obligated to confront.”
Will it ever change, and if so, will it be after the next disease outbreak?