Animal rights activists yesterday accused migrant workers, especially Vietnamese, of eating cats, dogs and protected species, while saying that the National Police Agency has been slow in dealing with animal rights violations.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) showed gruesome images and videos at a press conference at the legislature in Taipei yesterday, in which cats, dogs and possibly protected animals were slaughtered and consumed by what activists said were migrant workers.
Migrant workers breached Taiwan’s animal protection laws and provoked law enforcement by publicly displaying over 150 such images and videos on a certain Facebook community page, Tien said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“Given the large number of those videos and animals slaughtered, it is suspected that there is an underground industry to supply cats and dogs as food,” Animal Protection Policy Watch Alliance executive director Huang Tai-shan (黃泰山) said.
The alliance said the killing and eating of dogs by migrant workers has been a long-standing problem in Taiwan.
Huang said the alliance had reported 50 such cases to the agency this year, but it had not received a response.
While the agency has established a standard operating procedure to handle animal rights violations, lower-level officers are generally unaware of the procedure and tend to refuse to accept such cases or take on investigations, as such cases are not included in officers’ performance assessments.
Huang called on the agency to establish a special squad to take over animal abuse cases, while treating such cases as criminal offense and including them in performance assessments, adding that violation of the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法) by migrant workers should be counted toward employer’s and broker’s license evaluation and approval.
Pu-Ai Association of Animal Care executive director Lee Hung-chen (李虹真) said that in some cases, protected animals such as sharp-nosed vipers were eaten, which could endanger the balance of the ecosystem.
Taiwanese laws should be abided by and respected by all those living in the nation, regardless of their countries of origin, she said.
Criminal Investigation Bureau official Yu Yung-lien (余永廉) said that the bureau had transferred cases reported by the alliances to prosecutors in August, with one offender already convicted.
Killings of cats or dogs would be immediately processed, while cases involving suspected protected animals require assistance from the Council of Agriculture to ascertain whether the animals in question are designated as such, Yu said.
Agency official Huang Fu-kung (黃福坤) said that police officers are required to accept all reported cases, while the agency already designated slaughtering of non-economic animals as a criminal offense, while solving of animal abuse cases was already included in officers’ performance assessments.
Ministry of Labor official Chen Chang-pang (陳昌邦) said that employers and human resource agencies would be subject to a fine of between NT$60,000 and NT$300,000 (US$1,809 and US$9,048) if migrant workers they employed or imported violate animal protection laws.
Employers might be further prohibited from hiring migrant workers and brokers might be unable to renew their operating licenses, Chen said.
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:
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