At a youth roundtable last year, Kim Moon-soo, the country’s now labor minister, scolded the fresh-faced attendees: “What I worry about is young people not loving each other,” Kim said.“Instead, they love their dogs and carry them around, they don’t get married, and they don’t have children.” Members of a left-leaning minority party protested Kim’s comments at a recent press conference, and said he should consider intense working conditions and low wages before blaming pet owners for low birthrates.
The central government’s entreaty for younger generations to choose children over pets does have a twist: South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is married without children—and has a menagerie of at least 10 dogs and cats himself.“Sorry, this food’s only for daddy,” reads one of his Instagram posts, which shows two bichons frises staring at him as he eats a sandwich.
Salgu luxuriates in her stroller with a heat pack in the winter and an ice pack in the summer.“If I had a kid,” Kim notes, “I wouldn’t be able to take care of Salgu as much as I do now.” A dog-stroller boomDog-stroller sales have quadrupled since 2019, according to Yoon Hyun-shin, head of Pet Friends, South Korea’s largest online pet-commerce platform.
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