The Taipei Zoo on Friday accused rapper Qmone (Q毛萬) and two other men of breaking into the zoo after hours and frightening the animals with a flashlight.
The Taipei Police Department’s Wenshan First Precinct is to investigate the case by questioning Qmone, whose real name is Chen Po-jui (陳柏瑞), and reviewing a video of the alleged incident uploaded to YouTube in February.
The zoo said that Qmone and his two friends prepared gloves, flashlights and food for their midnight excursion.
The rapper said it was “the right thing to do at the wrong time.”
The trio allegedly wandered around looking for giraffes and lions and repeatedly disturbed animals by shining flashlights into the pens, zoo police said.
Although the video was uploaded this year, Qmone said it happened in February last year.
Zoo spokesperson Tsao Hsien-shao (曹先紹) accused the intruders of breaking and entering on government property, an offense prosecutable under the Criminal Code, and said that shining flashlights directly in animals’ faces violates the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法).
The three are also accused of urinating outside the zoo — a breach of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Health regulations, Tsao said.
The zoo saved the video and provided a copy to police, Tsao added.
Qmone is a Chinese Culture University student, netizens said on social media.
Tsao urged the university to make a statement condemning his actions, saying this sort of behavior should not be encouraged.
In Facebook comments on Friday, Qmone asked netizens why caging animals is legal, but his excursion is not.
Netizens said that under the Animal Protection Act, keeping animals in cages “was indeed legal.”
Qmone deleted his comments by Friday evening.
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