Dogs, Cats, and Koreans: A Country Where One in Three Households Lives with Animals

Walk around Seoul for an hour and you’ll notice it soon enough: you’ll see more dog strollers than baby strollers. That’s not an impression — it’s a statistic.

Just How Many Animals Live With Koreans?

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs conducted in-person interviews with 3,000 households across the country for its 2025 survey and found that 29.2% now live with companion animals — the highest figure since the surveys began. This is the moment when the long-used phrase “one in four households” officially became “one in three.”

Dig into the numbers and the species skew is stark. Among pet-owning households, 80.5% keep dogs, 14.4% keep cats, and 4.1% keep fish. But by headcount, cats are denser: the average dog-owning household has 1.11 dogs, while cat households average 1.27 cats — meaning people who keep cats often keep more than one.

Why Are Korean Dogs So Small?

Spotting a large-breed dog in Seoul is a rare treat. The reason is simple: most urban Korean households live in apartments, and building management rules — plus noise complaints from neighbors — effectively steer breed choices toward the compact end of the scale. The result is the reign of what Koreans call the Molpupo — the holy trinity of Maltese, Poodle, and Pomeranian.

🐶 Korea's Most Popular Dog Breeds

Four of the top five breeds clock in under 10 kg. This reality shapes the entire industry: Korea’s pet supplies, clothing, and grooming markets are built around small-dog specifications by default. It’s also why travelers with medium-to-large dogs often struggle to find gear that fits or venues that welcome them.

The Country Where Dog Strollers Outsell Baby Strollers

If you had to capture Korea’s pet culture in a single snapshot, this would be it. On the online shopping platform Gmarket, gaemocha (dog strollers) accounted for 33% of all stroller sales in 2021 and 36% in 2022 — then jumped to 57% in 2023, overtaking baby strollers (43%) for the first time. The Wall Street Journal picked up the stat, and the story rippled across international media.

This shift has a name: pet-fam-jok (pet + family), people who treat their animals as full family members. The sentiment shows up in spending. KB Financial’s 2025 survey found that satisfaction with pet ownership hit 76%, up 8.7 percentage points in a single year, and awareness of lifetime costs — adoption, care, medical treatment, funerals — rose alongside it. The market, valued at roughly 4 trillion won in 2023, is projected to reach the 6 trillion won range by 2027.

The Words Changed First

Korea’s transformation surfaced in its language before it appeared anywhere else. Through the 1990s, the standard term was aewandongmul (愛玩動物) — literally “an animal to love and play with.” Over the 2000s, this gave way to bandongmul (伴侶動物), meaning “a companion animal, a partner in life.” Today, government documents and legislation use only the latter. Using the old word now lands as outdated or tone-deaf.

What Happened to Dog Meat?

It’s the question foreigners ask most often about Korea’s pet culture, and the answer is unambiguous: from 2027, it’s illegal.

On January 9, 2024, the National Assembly passed the Special Act on the End of Dog Meat Consumption with 208 votes in favor and zero against. Three years after promulgation — that’s 2027 — breeding, slaughter, distribution, and sale of dogs for food will be fully prohibited. Violators face up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 30 million won. New farms, slaughterhouses, and distribution businesses were banned the moment the law was enacted, and the government is now funding transition programs for those leaving the trade.

What outpaced the law, though, was generational change. Dog meat consumption had been in decline for decades, and among Koreans in their twenties and thirties, it’s a practice that has effectively disappeared. In a country where more than 15 million people now live with companion animals, the legislation is less a cause of change than its culmination.

The Shadow Behind the Numbers

Not every statistic sparkles. In 2024, 106,824 animals were abandoned across Korea — 77,304 dogs (72.4%) and 27,826 cats (26.0%). That’s five consecutive years of decline, bringing the annual figure near the 100,000 mark for the first time in a decade. But what happens to the animals that enter the shelter system remains sobering.

📉 Outcomes for Animals Entering Shelters (2025 data)

Both adoption and euthanasia rates improved over the previous year, but roughly 43% of animals that enter shelters end their lives inside one. Budgets for the country’s 273 animal protection centers grow each year, and a grim seasonality repeats: abandonment reports spike right after major holidays, when the novelty of a gift animal wears off. This very problem is part of what has pushed mixed-breed adoption rates up to 15%.

Can You Explore Seoul With a Companion Animal?

You can. The rules, however, are specific.

For a traveler, this culture reveals itself in small, unremarkable ways. A dog stroller parked beside a café window. Pet treats on a convenience store shelf. A dedicated dog path winding through an apartment complex. But it’s exactly that unremarkability that makes the point: in today’s Korea, companion animals aren’t a novelty anymore. They’re the default.