Group protests cultures that dine on dogs and cats

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, July 18, 2003 | 10:23 a.m.

A small group of men and women with large photos of dead cats and dogs stood on a street corner in the heat of the afternoon this week to bring attention to a custom they said occurs thousands of miles away, especially in the dog days of summer.

The custom: eating animals that most people in Western culture think of as pets. The place: South Korea.

Nadine Zimmer, a former teacher from New York who now works in sales in Las Vegas, said the protest Wednesday was one of a series worldwide directed at bringing the government of South Korea to enforce laws already on that country's books that make killing dogs and cats for food illegal. She issued a press release saying that "some Koreans believe that eating dog meat stew will alleviate the summer heat," and plans to hold another protest next month.

But the spot chosen by the crew -- outside a Korean printing shop on Valley View Boulevard that is the local office for the Korean Central Daily, a regional newspaper -- made it inevitable that Korean-Americans would take the protest personally.

Such friction between the dominant culture of the United States and immigrant communities will become more common as the Las Vegas Valley becomes more cosmopolitan, said Matt Wray, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has studied race and ethnicity.

"Cities have always been zones of cultural contact and ... perspectives and customs come into conflict and sometimes harmony," Wray said.

"These conflicts ... are very much the future of Las Vegas."

In recent months, for example, cockfighting, a part of Mexican culture, was linked to the spread of a poultry disease locally, bringing the federal government to seek out fighting birds in the valley's backyards.

"It's complicated when you get a different cultural group passing judgment on your own," Wray said. "This is a blip on the cultural radar screen that's small but stands for something bigger."

Just ask a local Korean-American.

"It's not someone's right to say what's right or wrong to eat," said Bora Jeong, a 20-year-old woman who moved from South Korea to Las Vegas when she was 11 and works at the Korean Association of Las Vegas.

John Swetnam, an anthropology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that such incidents may lead immigrants to identify more with their native culture.

"People suddenly being told that they're different ... heightens people's sense of their own ethnic identity," he said.

Gary Beck, a member of the Las Vegas Korean Association, a nonprofit that helps Korean immigrants, has lived in Las Vegas for 25 of his 33 years. He has visited his native country five times during that period.

He said the protest made him feel as if his country was being singled out for something negative instead of the other way around.

"A lot of Koreans come to the U.S., they work hard ... and this points out something bad that doesn't have to do with us," he said. His family has run the Western Oriental Supermarket in Las Vegas for 19 years, he said.

He also wasn't sure if the protesters were interpreting his native culture accurately.

"Cats I've never heard of ... (and) it wouldn't even be 1 percent of the population ... that eats dogs," he said.

Jeong said a "special kind of dog" is bred for eating, but this is a custom that is disappearing and mostly found in the rural parts of South Korea. "It is not especially for the summer," she added.

Jeong also said she is a vegetarian, but would never tell somebody else not to eat meat.

"Anyway, there are people in the United States who eat snakes and alligator meat, so why don't they protest against that?" Beck said.

Zimmer said that she also protests against other examples of what she considers cruelty to animals practiced in the United States, such as dogfighting and circuses.

Aaron Wyrick, standing nearby with photos that brought honks from passing cars, said it was a matter of deciding what's right and what's wrong.

"There were cultures that sacrificed humans," he said.

"I'm against that, too."