Poor Fido!

I went to the outdoor market yesterday in Dangjin. There are tons of vendors there selling everything from vegetables, to blankets, to live octopus, to pottery, to toothbrushes. It's huge and you can buy pretty much anything there.
The smells that waft from that area of town are perplexing to the senses. There's fresh fruit and beetles being boiled in a large pot by a tiny ajuma (old Korean lady). There's live turtles swimming around and gasping fish flopping their Swan Song.
I came along an interesting piece of meat that I couldn't identify. I looked at one of my friends quizzically.
"Ummmm, what is that?"
He answered, "Dog." He answered very flatly, without making eye-contact and just kept walking. I stood there with my mouth agape.
"Um, what?!"
I just stood there.
I'm trying to look at it all anthropological-like. Such as, don't judge, this is a different culture, this is how they do things. But, no, I couldn't do it. I was staring at a freaking dogs flesh.
I tried to continue walking and forget about it, but we came along a freezer a couple stalls down. This was the only freezer-like or refrigerator-like object I saw all day. Plucked, headless chickens had been baking in the sun all day with no fear of salmonella in sight. I'll stick to buying vegetables and fruit here, me thinks.
The freezer was chock-full of skinned dog meat. The heads were still attached. The teeth were still intact in the poor things snout. I was completely mortified. I looked straight ahead and walked as fast as I could away from the freezer. Just a few steps ahead were two steel cages full of fluffy, sweet puppies. Fully breathing, licking and heart-beating, adorable puppies. I instantly fell in love with all of them, wanted to buy them and take them home and make absolutely certain that they wouldn't be a part of anyone's meal. I couldn't help but wonder if the puppies were being sold as pets or if they were being sold to eventually be eaten as food. I'm hoping for the former and I may be delusional, but I'm just going to hang on to that hope.