With an increasing number of Taiwanese keeping cats as pets, the Council of Agriculture is looking to include cats in its regulations on the management of the sale of specific animals, an official said on Saturday.
Chiang Wen-chuan (江文全), head of the council’s animal protection division, said the council plans to amend its Regulations for Particular Animal Industry Management, which currently only covers dogs, to include cats.
Chiang said the amendment is necessary to supplement the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法).
The law requires anyone who “operates [a] breeding, trading and lodging business of specific breeds of pets” to possess a permit, but it currently only applies in practice to those in the dog business because dogs are the only “specific breed” cited in the council’s regulations, leaving the sale of cats open to abuse.
Those who breed, trade or lodge specific breeds of pets without a permit face a fine of NT$100,000 (US$3,290) to NT$3 million and an order to stop operating the business.
The council, which is expected to announce the amendment as soon as this week, decided to add cats to the types of pets governed by the regulations after seeing a surge in the number of cats being registered as pets in Taiwan from 2012 to last year.
While only 27,548 cats were registered as pets in 2012, the number rose to 61,364 last year.
The Regulations for Pet Registry Management stipulate that certain animals that are kept as pets need to be registered.
The proposed amendment would take effect in a year’s time, giving businesses a buffer period to make the proper arrangements to abide by the new regulations.
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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