Eighteen stray or disabled dogs were flown from Taiwan to the US on a journey to new homes on Saturday, the result of efforts by volunteers from the Animal Rescue Team Taiwan (ARTT), who found the animals a second chance at life abroad.
Volunteers with ARTT bid farewell at the Kaohsiung Railway Station to the rescued dogs that they treated and took care of for the past few months, as the animals headed north for a plane that flew them halfway around the globe to meet their new owners in the US.
The 18 rescued dogs appeared healthy and vivacious, though months ago their lives were hanging by a thread before they were found.
Photo: Ko Yu-hao, Taipei Times
One of the canines was found with severe head injuries, making his head swell to the size of a pig’s, earning him the name “pig-headed dog,” volunteers said.
Another one, whom they called the “palm-severed dog,” was found snared in a steel-jawed foothold trap, with a puncture wound so deep its bone had been exposed, they said.
A “hairless dog” was delivered from New Taipei City’s (新北市) Tucheng District (土城), with a serious skin disease that made it hairless, while a litter of puppies were abandoned on an open ground at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, they said.
“After posting their stories of misery on the rescue team’s Web site, many loving families in New York and Los Angeles expressed a desire to adopt them,” the volunteers said, adding that it was hard to part with the dogs they had tended to for months.
“The ARTT has shipped more than 2,000 stray animals to the US and Canada for adoption over the past eight years. This weekend’s has been the largest single shipment of stray dogs so far,” said Ni Chao-cheng (倪兆成), head of the rescue team.
Overseas shipment costs for the 18 stray dogs totaled about NT$200,000, which volunteers paid for out of their own pockets, Ni said.
Ni also called on tourists planning to fly to the US and Canada in the future to sign up on the rescue team’s official Web site (www.savedogs.org) as a “dog ambassador” who can accompany and provide assistance to strays or disabled animals on their flights.
Translated by Stacy Hsu, staff writer
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching