Guess where the Jindo dog show was.

Waygook Next Door visited the Jindo Dog Festival World Dogshow last weekend and took a few pictures. You can find more on the official website and via a Naver search. I was interested to read some of her comments.

These dogs are everywhere on Jindo. Because the breed is protected as a national treasure, only Jindos that are bred on the island can be considered “pure”, and so everyone and their mother has a small kennel in the backyard because of the premium these puppies go for. On top of that, it is illegal to take them out of the country, and so most Jindos are microchipped at 6 months old, and yes, they do check, both at the airport and the checkpoint on the bridge to the mainland.

I've done some writing on Jindos before (here, too), remarking on the distance between the high regard they're held as a symbol of national pride and the way we seem them treated in real-life. If you read up on Jindos, or check out the Jindo county government site, you'll see that the chief reason the dogs are so prized is because they are considered uniquely Korean, and the promotional material goes out of its way to remind the reader of that time and time again.

there are concerns of which the rumors, verbally passed down, is believed to be true by our people: that the ancestors of the Jindo Dog are the Mongol dogs or dogs from Song dynasty, China.

Considering these points, we wish to make clear that the Jindo Dog is our nations native dog as a result of document analysis and scientific research.

Sounds familiar. Go ahead and read my first two posts on the topic for some more links and information.

I was also disturbed to read of another bit of news from Jindo:

The good: the weather was gorgeous, and I got to take “my dog” for a nice walk. The bad: I was sick, and so the whole day felt a little off, and I didn’t feel up to going to Mokpo with the other Jindo waygooks for the farewell festivities for one of them. The really bad: While said group was hiking, they came across a girl who had committed suicide on the trail by hanging herself, and they had to deal with the police all afternoon.