As is well known, many Asian countries have a fondness for consuming dog meat. In most other countries of the world, this practice is viewed as appalling as a dog is considered to be "man's best friend" and is the one animal that is emotionally closest to humans.Recently at the end of June in South Korea, the Korea Dog Farmers’ Association had scheduled a dog meat festival which was to be in an open-air market in a city just south of Seoul. It promised to showcase various canine delicacies including barbecued dog, sausages and steamed paws. For only $100 -150, an individual could select a live dog and have it butchered on the spot.The event also planned to sell cosmetics and alcohol made with canine ingredients. The purpose of this festival was to try to raise public awareness about the conditions on dog meat farms by featuring videos of canines being raised in clean environments. Currently the popular perception is just the opposite of this and rightly so. The Korea Dog Farmer's Association had hoped the festival would help to change public perception though and increase sales for the approximately 600 dog farms in the area.But instead of having a successful festival, something very remarkable happened instead. The annual dog meat festival wascanceled due to a large number of complaints by South Korean animal activists. Due to endless calls of complaints the festival organizers could not rent out the spaces to dog meat participants.Although eating dog meat has been a common practice for many years in Korea, recently public opinion has taken a downturn, especially from younger Koreans who oppose the practice and consider it an “international embarrassment.” As was stated by Park So-Youn, head of Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth, "This is making our country an international laughing stock, and making the whole world mistakenly believe that all South Koreans eat dogs."So thanks to the pressure from animal rights activists in South Korea, a small but significant step has been taken to hopefully end this century's old custom of treating dogs as mere meat producing animals. It is just the beginning of a larger movement starting to take place in other Asian countries such as China also.Godspeed this movement for the sake of millions of dogs and cats that are brutally raised and killed for consumption every year.