Kim Jong-un has ordered citizens to hand over their pet dogs — so they can be killed for food.

The North Korean dictator says pet dogs are now considered a ‘decadent’ luxury and a ‘tainted’ trend by bourgeois ideology’, and must be surrendered, according to a report by South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo media outlet.

Ilbo says the move is likely designed to quell public anger over the country’s economic tailspin. A source told the outlet that Kim made the order in July.

“Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down,” the source said.

Once the pets are rounded up, some go to zoos and some are sold into the restaurant trade, where dogs are regularly consumed. Pyongyang, the Daily Mail reports, has a number of specialised dog eateries.

Chosun Ilbo reports that although pet ownership was long frowned upon in North Korea, the state had seemed to relent since the late 1990s, when the rich of Pyongyang started owning pets as symbols of superiority.

Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down', a source said.

'Some of the dogs are sent to state-run zoos or sold to dog meat restaurants'.

A recent UN report stated that as many as 60 percent of North Korea's 25.5 million people are facing 'widespread food shortages' that have been worsened by international sanctions imposed on the regime for its nuclear missile programmes.  

Dog meat has long been considered a delicacy on the Korean Peninsula, although the tradition of eating dogs is gradually fading out in South Korea.  

Still, an estimated 1 million dogs are reared on farms to be consumed every year in the South.