The adoption of stray animals should be included in evaluations of school performance, animal rights advocates said yesterday, announcing the results of a national survey of school adoptions.
“When the Ministry of Education evaluates a school’s ‘life education,’ one of the measures it should include is whether they have adopted a stray animal,” Animal Protection Administration Oversight Committee board member Wang Wei-chi (王唯治) told a press conference in Taipei.
“You can not just say there are exams on related material, you need to show cases demonstrating that your ‘life education’ is a success,” Wang said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
In addition to adopting stray animals, schools could also be evaluated based on how many students were involved in caring for the animal and reports on what they had learned, he said.
Wang added that schools were the key to increasing animal adoption rates. By familiarizing students with the needs of adopted animals and also increasing parents confidence that their children could be responsible for an animal’s care, more animals might be adopted.
He said that more than 90,000 stray animals were caught last year nationally, with many animals euthanized if they are not adopted within 15 days.
Life Conservationist Association executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) said that with the euthanasia of animals scheduled to be banned in two years, the group has been working to promote animal adoption, focusing on neighborhoods as well as the nation’s 3,885 elementary and secondary schools.
A survey conducted by the group showed that about 6 percent of the nation’s schools have adopted a cat or a dog, with 12 percent of high schools and middle schools raising a pet, compared with only 3 percent of elementary schools.
Keelung had the highest adoption rate of 18.2 percent, while Taipei had the lowest at 3.5 percent.
Ministry of Education offical Chiu Jen-chieh (邱仁杰) said the ministry had already passed regulations regarding animals being adopted by schools and includes animal protection information in the school curriculum.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS