While some pet owners say that they love their pets like children and treat them accordingly, animal rights activists criticize too much pet-pampering as wasteful and even detrimental to relationships between pets and humans.
Tsai Ming-chih (
"My wife and I never got to leave the country at the same time after we got married because we didn't want to leave our dogs behind in a kennel," he said. "In the end, we decided to take our dogs along with us to Japan instead."
PHOTO: CNA
Although the five-day, four-night trip did not come cheap at NT$60,000 per person plus NT$15,000 per dog, not including the dog's transportation fees at NT$250 per kilogram. Tsai says that his customers are willing to pay for the experience.
"It's not just a holiday where you get to take your dog along," he said. "The whole trip is focused on the dog, and they have more fun than their owners."
Dogs are considered honored guests at specialized pet hotels and other businesses in Japan, according to Tsai.
"The dogs have their own swimming pools and their meals are as carefully prepared as their owners'," said Tsai. "During the day we might take the dogs to theme parks catering specifically to dogs."
There's nothing his customers won't do for their "canine children," Tsai said. He cited two women who went on his tours with their four daschunds.
"They are both quite busy with their careers during the week, so they have a Filipina maid just to take care of the dogs and prepare their meals," said Tsai.
"I've never had a customer with kids," said Tsai. "We find them quite like-minded with us in this respect -- their dogs are treated like their children."
At this weekend's Aqua and Pet Show, owners of rabbits, cats, pigs, flying squirrels as well as many different varieties of dogs brought their pets along to the third hall of the Taipei World Trade Center.
Many of the smaller pets were carried in bags or pushed around in pet strollers.
"It's a practical choice when the ground is muddy or my yorkshire terrier is tired," said one prospective buyer.
According to Amos Lin (
The best-selling stroller was available at the show for NT$3,990, said Lin.
However, Sean McCormack, the founder of Animals Taiwan, a stray rescue organization, groaned at the idea of dogs being treated as substitute children or being pushed around in strollers.
"The more you treat a dog like a person, the more behavioral problems you're going to get," he said.
"I think it's great that dogs are increasingly considered a part of the family in Taiwan, but they still need to be treated as dogs, not toys and not children," McCormack said, "The dogs we have the most problems with [at Animals Taiwan] are always the little dogs who might have been carried around in a handbag all their lives."
"The happiest dogs are the ones who are walked every day and allowed to interact with their environment -- not kept at home or pushed around in a pet buggy," he said.
For animal lovers with the extra cash to spend, McCormack suggests using the money to neuter the animals, or donating to animal welfare organizations so that more animals can be cared for.
"For NT$1,000, we could neuter a male dog. For NT$2,000 we could spay a female dog or fix a dog with a broken leg," he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift