An animal rights group yesterday urged the government to investigate within three months the conditions of protected animals raised by private citizens and regulate the owners by executing a microchip implant policy after it received multiple reports that some protected animals were being tortured by the owners.
At a press conference yesterday, the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) disclosed a video clip showing a honey bear and a Formosan black bear imprisoned in a small cage. The honey bear was pacing back and forth and kept licking its fur, while the black bear was lying listlessly in its cage.
“When the video was shown to animal experts in the UK, they told us that the bears showed symptoms of animals living on the verge of insanity,” EAST director Chen Yu-ming (陳玉敏) said. “Eventually the honey bear died and the black bear’s paws were broken.”
“The bears needed trees to scratch their paws and backs, but they were forced to live in cages and live on swill,” she said.
“It is like they were better off dying than living,” she said.
Chen said that when asked the whereabouts of the dead honey bear, the owner told the EAST representative they had dumped the body on a mountainside and did not eat it.
Aside from the bears, Chen said they also found other protected animals living under inhumane conditions, including orangutans and tigers.
The group said the practice of keeping protected animals did not seem to have been changed by an amendment to the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法) in 1994 that states that authorities must help the owners finish raising the protected animals within three years.
“The official statistics only show that the nation has about 1,507 animals from protected species raised by private citizens as of May 31 this year,” Chen said. “Since no data was available in 1994, there is no way of knowing if the number is increasing or decreasing.”
“The plight of the animals showed that the act was not adequately enforced,” EAST chairman Thomas Chan (詹順貴) said, adding that the Council of Agriculture and local governments should inspect the premises these protected animals are kept on and find out if any of the owners mistreat the animals. Protected animals should also be implanted with microchips and registered in the government’s database to prevent the owners from abusing these animals, Chan added.
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