A guide dog foundation yesterday appealed to dog lovers to join a program to host guide dog puppies and nurture them into valuable companions for visually impaired people.
Huikuang Guide Dog Center director Yang Shu-tuan (楊素端) said the center’s first generation of dogs was born last year, with the second generation of puppies expected soon.
That is why the center is urgently looking for families to raise the puppies, she said.
Guide dogs need a host family to take care of them and provide initial training while they are puppies. After one year the dogs are assessed to see if they are fit for further training.
Those who fail the assessment will quit the training program and be given away to foster families.
Dogs that pass the assessment will undergo further training to become working dogs. They will be retired after serving as guide dogs for 10 years and the center will arrange a home for them until their death.
Host families are required to meet certain conditions. They have to live in the Taipei or Taoyuan areas and at least one adult should be at home all the time to take care of the puppies. The host families should also have a car, and there should not be more than one child younger than 7 in the family.
The families would work with the center to provide initial training for the puppies.
The costs of feeding the dogs and other expenses such as medical bills will be sponsored by pet food companies and public donations, Yang said.
There are currently only 24 certified and working guide dogs in Taiwan, said an official of the Taiwan Guide Dog Association, one of only two guide dog groups in the country that has trained and bred the dogs.
More than 50,000 people in Taiwan are blind, which means there is one dog for every 2,083 blind people.
The International Guide Dog Federation’s ideal ratio of guide dogs to the blind is one to 100.
About 50 visually impaired people in the country are applying to get a guide dog, an official with the association said.
Although the number seems small, it is understandable given that guide dogs have only been introduced in Taiwan seven years ago, the official said.
Yang said that the nation’s visually impaired people used to rely on canes and they would need some time to adapt to the new type of assistance.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the