Fifty-three abused dogs rescued from a site in New Taipei City are available for adoption at the city government-run animal shelter in Banciao District (板橋) today. Shelter staff are calling on the public to adopt the animals to help them recover from fear.
In late January, the Taiwan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals received an anonymous report with a video that revealed a private animal shelter in the city’s Tamsui District (淡水) where more than 200 dogs and cats were being kept in extremely dire conditions.
The dogs were being kept in a forested area in the mountains by a woman called Chen Hsi-hung (陳喜紅), who had received many donations from the public, but had failed to take care of the animals, society executive director Connie Chiang (姜怡如) said yesterday.
About 30 dogs were found dead at the site, many being consumed by maggots, while one dead dog was barely recognizable, she said, recalling her visit to the site with the city government’s Animal Protection and Health Inspection Office on Feb. 6.
The shelter sent 38 dogs needing emergency medical treatment to veterinary hospitals and settled the others at the city government’s animal shelters, office Director-General Chen Yuan-chuan (陳淵泉) said yesterday.
Chen Hsi-hung was sent to the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on suspicion of violating many articles of the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法), he added.
Although the dogs are being tended to, most of them appear to be consumed by fear, shelter staff said.
The society’s volunteers arranged an adoption drive for the rescued dogs at the city’s public shelter in Banciao, which started yesterday and continues from 10am to 4pm today, she said, adding that, despite promoting the drive on the Internet, very few people came to adopt dogs yesterday, partly because mixed-breed dogs are less favored.
The city’s great number of stray animals is “a decades-old problem,” and it is essential to prevent their numbers from growing further, Chen Yuan-chuan said.
Since the office implemented the “trap, neuter, vaccinate and release” policy, the number of stray dogs in the city has been reduced from more than 20,000 in 2015 to 15,000 last year, he added.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift