In a horrific incident, over 1,000 abandoned dogs were starved to death by a 60-year-old man in South Korea, media reports said. South Korea Police investigating the animal abuse case said the accused has confessed to "taking in abandoned dogs and starving them until they died", The Korea Herald reported.
Animal rights activists, however, said the man was paid by dog breeders to get rid of canines that were past the breeding age or were no longer commercially attractive. He was paid 10,000 won per dog from 2020 to "take care of them" following which he locked them up and starved them to death, a representative of animal rights group Care told cable news channel MBN.
A local had stumbled upon the horror in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, the most populated area of South Korea, when he was looking for his own lost dog.
As per reports, decayed carcasses of the abused dogs created a layer on the ground, on top of which more bodies were kept to make another row and so on. The starved dogs were kept in cages, sacks and rubber boxes.
The local government in Yangpyeong said the dead dogs would be removed this week.
Four dogs managed to survive the torturous circumstances and are receiving treatment at a clinic for malnutrition and skin disease. Two of the four dogs are in critical condition, South China Morning Post reported.
While South Korea has strict animal protection laws where those who kill an animal by failing to feed or water it on purpose face up to three years in prison or up to 30 million won in fines, cases of animal abuse in the country have been on the rise.
Animal abuse cases rose from 69 to 914 in a nine-year period between 2010 and 2019, Mirror reported. According to the agriculture ministry's Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency, incidents of animal abandonment also rose by around 40,000.
