My interview with the City Watch Los Angeles is published. We are grateful to Mr. Jeffrey Mausner for this interview and for helping to promote our campaign.
Click HERE to read: https://citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/animal-watch/22164-interview-with-giny-woo-koreandogs-org-founder-stopping-dog-meat-trade-in-s-korea
ANIMAL RIGHTS - The organization KoreanDogs.org has been working to end the Dog Meat Trade in South Korea for 10 years.
Its founder, Giny Woo, (photo above) was born in South Korea and came to the United States when she was 15 years old. When Giny was a young girl living in Incheon, her pet dog went missing. Later, she saw several men in a field across from her house burning a dog, which they were going to eat. This was when she became acutely aware of the fate of many dogs in South Korea. Giny was not sure if the poor dog in the field was hers, but she has always been haunted by the thought that it might have been, or that her dog had met the same fate.
Jeff: Please tell us about the founding of KoreanDogs.org.
Giny: One day in 2011, I was at home searching the Internet to see what dog rescue organizations I could make donations to. I came across an animal advocacy organization with a “Korean Dog Meat Cruelty” campaign featured on its website. I looked into the issue further and discovered that there were many animal rights organizations in Korea campaigning to stop the dog meat industry. This was the first time I learned that there were people in Korea fighting against this terrible industry.
As I did more research, I saw the most horrific and heartbreaking images. I felt tremendous sadness and anguish about the terrible injustices and cruelty against dogs, which I love so much, and I had to tell their story. I understood Korea’s culture and language and that put me in a great position to reveal what was going on to non-Koreans.
Jeff: What were some of the things you started doing to help end the dog meat trade in South Korea?
Giny: I began doing whatever I could to raise awareness about the issue and to encourage people to take action and put pressure on the Korean government. My aim was to force it to stop ignoring the problem and take steps to end the horrendous industry.
I started posting on Facebook and uploading videos on YouTube, and I created a website devoted to fighting the dog meat industry. I would spend countless hours working on campaigns, and I created literally hundreds of petitions and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures.
I would translate videos of TV programs from Korea about the dog meat issue and add subtitles to them so that people all over the world could see what was really happening inside Korea. As I’m not a professional translator, I had to play these videos over and over to translate them accurately and put timestamps on them. Having to see repeatedly the heart-wrenching footage of how these dogs were treated with such callousness was emotionally devastating for me. There were times when I stayed up all night translating because I felt such an urgency to help these dogs.
Jeff: What did you do before you began working to end the dog meat trade?
Giny: I was an accountant working in the corporate world, so I knew nothing about campaigning.
And, because English is my second language, and pretty much everything that I was doing was new to me, there were many challenges and a big learning curve.
Click HERE to read the article: https://citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/animal-watch/22164-interview-with-giny-woo-koreandogs-org-founder-stopping-dog-meat-trade-in-s-korea
You can also read the interview HERE.
• Homepage: https://koreandogs.org/
• What You Can Do: https://koreandogs.org/what-you-can-do/
• Call for Action: https://koreandogs.org/what-you-can-do/call-for-action/
• Petition: https://koreandogs.org/petitions/
• Blog: https://koreandogs.org/blog/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/koreandogs
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Koreandogs
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Againstdogmeat
• Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/koreandogs/