Animal rights advocates yesterday urged the Forestry Bureau to establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for reporting wounded wildlife after a reported rise in case numbers.
Local governments on average receive 22,517 reports about wildlife per year, 34.8 percent of which are about wounded animals.
However, most local agencies have only one or two officials in charge of such cases, Environmental and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) data compiled in November showed.
Government efforts to promote animal protection have been hampered by a high turnover rate of officials at local government agencies, as well as a lack of veterinarians, volunteers and funds, bureau division director Hsia Jung-sheng (夏榮生) told a public hearing in Taipei.
The meeting was organized by EAST and Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) to invite opinions on how to streamline wildlife emergency reporting.
In February last year, the nation officially banned euthanizing cats and dogs, but putting down seriously injured animals remains an issue, causing injured animals a lot of unnecessary pain, EAST director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said, urging the government to establish SOPs for wildlife euthanasia.
The euthanasia of wild animals is like a Pandora’s box that few officials and veterinarians want to touch, a Taipei Animal Protection Office veterinarian said on condition of anonymity.
Veterinarians tend to use many resources to treat animals that have little chances of survival, while other animals that are in need are not being properly treated, Taiwan Cetacean Society deputy secretary-general Chang Chi-ming (張豈銘) said.
Veterinarians should receive more training so they know how to tell people that their pet needs to be euthanize out of kindness, said Endemic Species Research Institute veterinarian Chan Fang-tse (詹芳澤), who has been working with animal rescue and providing mercy killings for about 18 years.
Common guidelines about wild animal euthanasia should be set up, but they should also include specifics about other animal species, he said, adding that euthanasia should be conducted with due regard to animal rights.
Animal rights campaigners also called on the bureau to create a database that would integrate reports filed by the public about animals in danger.
The database should allow users to report what facilities they need so welfare groups can borrow expensive instruments, such as blood analyzers, from other agencies that are not using them, said Lin Te-en (林德恩), an assistant researcher at the institute’s Zoology Division.
EAST asked the bureau to release drafts about reporting procedures and information databases in six months.
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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