Pets that get into sticky situations might need to wait longer for help as the Taipei City Government’s fire department looks to reduce its animal rescue operations in a move announced by Taiwan Solidarity Union Taipei City Councilor Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) yesterday and which is being taken by other departments across the nation.
Historically, fire departments have been willing to rescue pets that get stuck in places such as roofs and drainage ditches, but as pet populations soar, fire departments have been overwhelmed by rescue requests, the National Fire Agency said, adding that many fire departments want to shift the responsibility to other government agencies.
“Although some departments will still help, others recently told us that they would no longer rescue cats and dogs,” said Tung Kuan-fu (董冠富), head of the Taiwan Life Caring and Animal Rescue Organization.
For example, the Greater Taichung fire department this year has handled less than 20 pet rescue cases, according to statistics provided by the department.
In the case of Taipei, the current division of labor is the result of informal coordination between the city’s fire department and animal protection office, under which the office has gradually taken responsibility for most rescue cases involving cats and dogs, Taipei Fire Department’s disaster and rescue division head Wang Cheng-hsiung (王證雄) said.
As a result, rescue cases handled by the department have dropped by 76 percent since 2011, department statistics show. In turn, rescue cases handled by the animal protection office have surged by more than 350 percent.
However, the office does not have enough staff to handle the growing workload, with only seven people available to respond to calls at any given time, a specialist with the office Tsai Yu-jen (蔡裕仁) said.
In addition, these personnel do not have the ladders and training firefighters have for scaling tall buildings, hampering rescue efforts, he said.
Tsai said that for cases involving tall buildings, the office has continued to rely on the assistance of the fire department. However, many firefighters are unwilling to take on the trouble and danger of pet rescue missions, he said.
“Pet rescue efforts cannot continue to rely on informal understandings between agencies,” Chen told a press conference yesterday.
He said that as time passes, the new system of separating responsibilities would make it more difficult for the Taipei Fire Department to justify assisting in pet rescue efforts.
Chen called on the government to provide equipment and training to the animal protection office and related private organizations as the fire department reduces its animal rescue operations.
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