Taipei City Councilor Pang Chien-kuo (
"It's been years since the city first promoted the idea of electronic tagging, but we have seen dogs implanted with chip IDs that still fail to be reunited with their owners," Pang said. "It's the biggest joke of the century."
In 1995, Taipei launched a campaign to encourage pet owners to implant ID chips into their pets. The efforts eventually led to the Legislative Yuan's passage of the Animal Protection Law (
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
The Council of Agriculture (COA, 農委會) in September 1999 gave pet owners one year to have their pets electronically tagged. Violators face fines between NT$2,000 and NT$10,000 starting Sept. 1.
Holding a stray Shin Tzu dog (
Sun said that although the dog was electronically tagged in 1997, the stray cannot be reunited with its owner because the owner had failed to register the Shin Tzu. Sun then turned to Pang for help.
"I really hate to see it killed as a stray dog," Sun said. "There must be something we can do to locate its owner, but until then I'll do my best to keep it."
Lin Chin-chung (
"We know that the law itself has some drawbacks and I too feel frustrated, but I'm afraid that there's not much we can do about it," he said.
According to Lin, the city currently has more than 260,000 dogs, about 210,000 of which are domestic pets and 50,000 are strays.
Of the 210,000 pets, roughly 70,000 have ID chip implants.
Nevertheless, electronically tagged dogs haven't been reunited with their owners because of the poor quality of some ID chips or conflicting scanner and tag systems.
According to Lin, over 30 percent of the 70,000 electronically tagged dogs cannot be reunited with their owners.
There are 154 pet registration centers citywide that are equipped with the facilities to implant chips.
But competing tag and scanner systems available on the market make it difficult to facilitate reunions, as public shelters are unlikely to be equipped with a collection of different scanners that could decode every chip in existence. The best thing a pet owner can do, Lin said, is to chose a good quality product and make sure they register their pet.
The fee for tagging is NT$750. The registration fee costs NT$250. The price will revert back to its original NT$500 starting in January.
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