I’ve been told that in Korea eating dogs is fairly common. A Korean friend of mine says that the dogs are not raised on farms, but are strays that are rounded up. I would think that a restaurant would want a more stable way of obtaining dog meat. A google search showed me some sites that didn’t seem to be trushtworthy sources of information. So, are dogs raised in Korea specifically to be eaten, or are they just strays?
So, I’m interpreting this all to mean that no, those 6,000 or so restaurants aren’t out there rounding up random strays, and yes, someone somewhere is raising dogs for the trade, although it’s technically illegal.
You can point out to your Korean friend that, as you suspect, it doesn’t make good business sense for a restaurant owner not to have a steady supply of his raw materials. A famous seafood restaurant, for example, doesn’t wait to open for business until a fisherman turns up with some seafood for them to cook.
While stationed in South Korea right before the Olympics in 88, I saw nary a dog kennel but my subsequent postings in 93 and 96 I saw several stacked cages of dogs usually three high and two deep filled with “consumable animals” which is what my Korean girlfriend at the time (93) called them.
This was in Downtown Seoul, and also in Songtan about an hour south of the Capitol.