During the Olympics, South Korea is openly looking to make nice with North Korea, their evil brother to the north. However, there is one aspect of their culture they’re trying to hush, and it’s happening in the shadow of the Olympic stadium in Pyeongchang.

It’s not Gangnum Style, either.



No, South Korea would like Westerners to forget that there are dog farms nearby — places where dogs grow up just to turn into meat. They never become someone’s companion, they never become a family’s beloved pet. They live out their short lives in cages and meet a brutish end in a butcher’s shop. There are about two million of these dogs who meet the same fate yearly.

However, there is one Olympian athlete who has become a champion to these dogs. Canadian skater Meagan Duhamel has become a voice for them, especially since she met Moo-Tae.

Moo-tae was one of those unlucky pooches destined for the stew pot — that is, until some Buddhist monks rescued him from a dog farm while he was still a puppy. Enter Meagan Duhamel, an avid yoga and meditation practitioner who was in South Korea last year. She found Moo-tae with the monks, and was excited that he “loved to sit with the Buddhas during meditation and yoga,” as she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, maybe this dog has some special spiritual energy.’ That was really why I chose him.”

Well, okay. I would’ve chosen him for his enormous brown eyes. Plus, he’s a dachshund mix, which would’ve reminded me of the two we had when I was growing up. I do have a soft spot for the little stinkers.

Today Moo-tae lives with Duhamel and her husband/coach Bruno Marcotte in Montreal. He’s happy with his fellow pets — a beagle and a cat, both rescue animals. And he still loves to sit with Duhamel as she meditates.

But it appears that the dog meat trade may be waning. Younger Koreans are rejecting canine consumption, which is practiced more often by older Koreans, who think it increases virility. Moreover, as of 2016, one in five Korean households has a dog or cat as a pet. And even South Korean president Moon Jae-in has a dog in his home — a rescue mutt named Tory.

Furthermore, South Korea isn’t the only Asian nation which is starting to reject the consumption of canines, and of cats, too. Last year Taiwan explicitly banned the sale of dogs and cats for meat, even though the practice was never as widespread there as in Korea. Still, it sends a signal to other Asian nations that animal cruelty is intolerable.

Meagan Duhamel may go back to her native Canada with Olympic medals won for figure skating. Or she may not. However, she’s become a champion of another sort, and that’s for the welfare of four-legged victims of cruelty. And while I’ll certainly cheer on Team USA, as someone whose had many dogs and cats in my life, I salute Meagan Duhamel for publicizing such awful treatment of dogs.