No-kill shelters can be successful if local government heads “have a heart,” animal rights campaigners said at a news conference on Tuesday, which marked the first year of the policy’s nationwide implementation.
The success of no-kill shelters is not dependent on a large budget and staff, the Taiwan Alliance for Animal Rights Policy said, citing Council of Agriculture statistics for the average time strays stayed at shelters in various jurisdictions.
During the worst of the overcrowding crisis at animal shelters last year, Taoyuan shelters had an average stay time of nine months — the highest in the nation — followed by seven months in Chiayi City and Hsinchu County, and six months in Nantou, alliance executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) said.
However, shelters in seven jurisdictions — New Taipei City, Keelung, and Lienchang, Kinmen, Penghu, Hualien and Taitung counties — logged average stays of less than a month for strays, he said.
The council’s figures show that budgets and staff are not crucial to successfully implementing the no-kill shelter policy, as the cities and counties that performed well did not necessarily have more resources, he said.
“Whether local government heads have a heart is the crucial factor in making improvements,” he said.
Not having enough shelter space, many cities and counties have adopted the so-called “targeted capture” model of animal control, which has caused the stray animal population to increase, Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan director Chen Yu-ming (陳玉敏) said.
The experience of European nations has shown that managing no-kill shelters requires strict regulations on sales of pet animals and the legal obligations of pet owners, she said.
“Measures such as neutering pet cats and dogs, increasing public awareness of animal welfare and other forms of front-line management are crucial for the eventual success of no-kill shelters,” she said.
The government is focusing its efforts on assisting Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi and Nantou counties, which are lagging behind in implementing the policy, the council’s Animal Protection section chief Jiang Wen-chuan (江文全) said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
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: