Despite the increasing number of domestic companion animals, owners and citizens are not adequately informed on how to take care of pets. This has resulted in the advent of media contents delivering ideal ways to take care of one’s animal.
According to a research done by Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency on “Citizens’ Consciousness of Animal Protection in 2018,” 23.7 percent of households are living with pets. It is estimated that approximately 511 million families own a pet and the percentage had increased from 17.4 percent in 2010 to 21.8 percent in 2015.
Responding to the surge of interest in companion animals, an official animal media content corporation called Dongrami is creating online content including information regarding animal care and awareness, striving to make a world where animals and human can live in harmony.
Dongrami, also known as “Animal & Human Story,” holds different projects, for instance, producing professional video contents about animals. The institution also operates Naver Animal Sympathy Board since 2017, which is an online bulletin board where posts about animals are uploaded regularly. For example, one of the posts advise desensitization processes when one’s dog turns violent in the elevator and the solution provided is to turn the environment into an enjoyable place.
Dongrami provides animal care videos, animal web-toons and an encyclopedia of puppies on their blog. They also post animal audio clips that provide comforting sounds for pets.
The book titled “Animal Avengers” has also been published by the organization to prevent unnecessary suffering of animals by suggesting a counterpart logic. In this book, numerous ways of human abusing animals and its phenomenon are accused from a human’s point of view. Not only does the story discuss the ways to foster peaceful coexistence of human and animals, but also it suggests strategies to eradicate unnecessary exploitation of living things.
The community has been participating in offline projects such as associative campaigns to raise animal awareness. Last January, Dongrami worked on a project with an animal protectionist group called Korea Animal Rights Advocates (KARA) to break down prejudice on abandoned dogs and make them realize the low rate of dog adoption. Videos of adopted dogs spending time with new families were uploaded on social media to emphasize the joy of animal adoption.
In addition, Dongrami made a contract with the Korean Society of Feline Medicine on March 12 for mutual cooperation to manage a rightful way to proliferate the ideal culture of pets.
The Korean Society of Feline Medicine aims to create mobile video contents and actively take part in educational events concerning animal rights in Korea. They hope to provide a variety of promotion channels for societal contribution.
The corporation mentioned what the society should value to encourage correct perception about animals.
“In order to improve animal awareness, we believe that education is crucial,” Dongrami remarked.
“For the older generation, we have to teach them how to communicate with ‘a new family member’ and for the younger generation, it is necessary to teach them how to actively engage in treating animals with respect.”
Based on producing contents related to animals and pets, Dongrami also shared their plans for next projects.
“It has not been that long since dogs and cats started being considered as companion animals, so there is a high possibility that unfortunate things might occur later on,” Dongrami mentioned. “One example is pet loss, which deals with the dilemma on how to overcome despair after the loss.