The Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine on Thursday said that nine dead Reeve’s muntjacs found during the Lunar New Year holiday in Yilan County’s mountainous areas did not have rabies.
The bureau received a public tipoff about the dead muntjacs in Yilan’s Yuanshan Township (員山), Deputy Director-General Shih Tai-hua (施泰華) said.
The bureau recalled several personnel from their vacation to investigate and found seven dead muntjacs, three of which were in a state of severe decomposition and were buried immediately, he said.
Although the four other carcasses were in various stages of decomposition, the Animal Health Research Institute’s laboratory was able to examine them and found that they did not have rabies, he said.
“The lab results refuted media reports that the muntjacs might have been attacked by rabid ferret-badgers,” he said.
To date, no rabid ferret-badgers have been found in Yilan and the spread of rabid badgers have not reached north of Hualien or south of Taichung, bureau Director-General Feng Hai-tung (馮海東) said.
Animals with rabies have been found in 81 districts and townships spread over nine of the nation’s cities and counties, but Yilan County is not one of them, the bureau said.
Rabies has only been found in the badger population and there have been no reported incidences of muntjacs with rabies, the bureau 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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