Animal rights activists, environmentalists and other groups condemned the Council of Agriculture yesterday for “making a decision behind closed doors” on importing pandas from China and urged it to hold public hearings on the matter.
“In the past 20 years, applications to import pandas from China were filed on at least five occasions,” the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST), the Taiwan Academy of Ecology, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and other groups said in a joint statement.
The groups said the first three applications filed by the Taipei City Zoo between 1988 and 1991 were rejected after the Executive Yuan and the council consulted experts and international animal protection groups.
In 2005, when Taipei City Zoo filed its fourth application to import pandas, the Democratic Progressive Party government called three meetings with animal specialists and experts, as well as a public hearing to which more than a dozen animal rights and ecological organizations were invited, the groups said.
However, after the Leofoo Theme Park and the Taipei City Zoo filed applications to import pandas this year, the situation changed, the group said.
“We have been completely excluded from the decision-making process,” EAST director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said. “Requests that the council make the decision-making process transparent were never answered. The council has even kept the list of academics who will sit on the application review committee confidential.”
The review committee is scheduled to meet today.
While names of review committee members were traditionally released to the public before the meeting, “the council said it would keep the list confidential to avoid ‘unnecessary’ disruptions and minimize the pressure on the members,” Chen said.
“In fact, the council has said it would announce [today] whether the Taipei City Zoo or the Leofoo Park will be home to the pandas, which shows us that the government has already approved the importation,” she said.
While Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials have argued that pandas from China could serve as “angels of peace” in cross-strait relations, Chen panned the government for politicizing pandas and putting “politics above ecology.”
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