Saturday, April 01, 2006
Animal Lovers
Everywhere you go in Korea you are assaulted by a saccharine-sweet obsession of puppies, kittens and little chicks. Pencil cases, notebooks, t-shirts, bags, mobile phones - it's inescapable and nauseating. Women sport small dogs as accessories. Little rat-sized ones (nothing that can't fit in a stylish handbag) which are strategically trimmed and then dyed. Yes, you read that right. Dyed. All the colours of the rainbow.
And as spring arrives and the land is reborn once again, this is marked by women standing outside school playground selling chicks to the children. Live chicks. In cups. This sounds sort of cute and adorable but for the fact that children, flush with the joy and energy of just having finished another school day, are a tad careless.
"Look! I've bought a little baby chick!"
"Aaaaawww. So cute! Hey, do you want to play football?"
"Wait a minute, I'll just put the chick in my pocket and then we'll kick off..."
Cue one dead bird.
Many don't even survive the hundred metre walk from school to my academy, but there are still enough chirping birds to make a lesson unteachable. Any chicks that make it longer than 2 or 3 days would be considered a miracle, especially considering that most of the kids haven't understood that the prerequisites for life are warmth and food. There are stories about someone having raised one successfully where it laid lots of eggs and so on, but I think they're the Korean equivalent of "There was a kid at my school called Richard Head. Seriously."
So essentially every year there is the mass negligent slaughter of baby birds in order to entertain the children for a day or two. I'm guessing there isn't a Korean SPCA. Or maybe it's an attempt to educate children about the value of life - a lesson they annually fail to learn, evidently.
There's a fish season in the summer as well.
And as spring arrives and the land is reborn once again, this is marked by women standing outside school playground selling chicks to the children. Live chicks. In cups. This sounds sort of cute and adorable but for the fact that children, flush with the joy and energy of just having finished another school day, are a tad careless.
"Look! I've bought a little baby chick!"
"Aaaaawww. So cute! Hey, do you want to play football?"
"Wait a minute, I'll just put the chick in my pocket and then we'll kick off..."
Cue one dead bird.
Many don't even survive the hundred metre walk from school to my academy, but there are still enough chirping birds to make a lesson unteachable. Any chicks that make it longer than 2 or 3 days would be considered a miracle, especially considering that most of the kids haven't understood that the prerequisites for life are warmth and food. There are stories about someone having raised one successfully where it laid lots of eggs and so on, but I think they're the Korean equivalent of "There was a kid at my school called Richard Head. Seriously."
So essentially every year there is the mass negligent slaughter of baby birds in order to entertain the children for a day or two. I'm guessing there isn't a Korean SPCA. Or maybe it's an attempt to educate children about the value of life - a lesson they annually fail to learn, evidently.
There's a fish season in the summer as well.
# posted by Stuart Reid @ 8:15 PM 
