He went to South Korea for the Winter Olympics. He came home with something far more important than a medal.
Olympic freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy has made a habit of rescuing dogs wherever his athletic career takes him.
Four years earlier, competing at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, he rescued a street dog named Mamuchka and two puppies named Jake and Mishka alongside his athletic duties.
This time, in South Korea ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, he went further.
Kenworthy visited a dog meat farm in partnership with Humane Society International, one of 17,000 such farms still operating in South Korea, where an estimated 10 million dogs are taken for their meat every year. What he saw there stopped him.
“The dogs here are malnourished and physically abused, crammed into tiny wire-floored pens, and exposed to the freezing winter elements,” Kenworthy wrote on Instagram. “Despite the beliefs of some, these dogs are no different from the ones we call pets back home. Some of them were even pets at one time and were stolen or found and sold into the dog meat trade.”
What made this particular farm’s story different was the man who owned it.
After more than ten years of dog meat farming, the owner approached Humane Society International himself.
He had experienced a change of heart and did not want his dogs sent to slaughter. He asked HSI to help him close the farm, rescue the animals, and transition into a new livelihood growing mushrooms.
HSI said yes. And Kenworthy helped them tell the world about it.
All 90 dogs from the farm were prepared for transport to Canada, where HSI would find them forever homes.
Kenworthy adopted one of them personally, a puppy he named Beemo, who he brought back to the United States to live with him.
“I cannot wait to give her the best life possible,” he wrote.
Kenworthy was not the only Olympian moved to act.
Figure skating gold medalist Meagan Duhamel adopted a dog named Moo-tae from a South Korean meat farm during a pre-Olympic test event, and later flew a three-year-old beagle named Ha-Wool to the United States to begin his search for a forever home.
Two Olympians. Ninety dogs. One farmer who chose differently. This is what it looks like when the world starts to change.
Source:
thedodo – “Olympic Skier Helps Save 90 Dogs From A Korean Meat Farm”