Members of the Animal Rescue Team Taiwan are calling for better enforcement of laws prohibiting the use of animal traps, after three dogs in Kaohsiung lost their legs to the devices last week.
One of the injured dogs, which lost a front leg, was nursing a litter when it was found, the team said.
Laws should be amended to allow the city’s Animal Protection Office to more effectively seize traps to prevent a recurrence of such “heart-wrenching” incidents, they added.
Photo courtesy of Animal Rescue Team Taiwan
Last week, the team was called to rescue three dogs in the city’s Liouguei (六龜) and Tianliao (田寮) districts, and Singda Harbor (興達港), and rushed the dogs to surgery to save their lives, the team said.
Article 14-2 of the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法) prohibits the manufacture, sale, import, export and display of animal traps unless authorized by the central government.
The act was amended on June 29, 2011, because the authorities said the traps were a “cruel implement of slaughter and should forever disappear from Taiwan,” rescue team spokesperson Anthony Ni (倪京台) said.
Photo courtesy of Animal Rescue Team Taiwan
Despite the amendment, the number of cases handled by the team involving cats and dogs mutilated by traps has not dropped over the past seven years, he said.
Only 10 percent of animals caught in traps have been saved, with a majority dying from sepsis, he said.
Protected animals also get caught in the traps, Ni said, citing reports of leopard cats and Formosan bears coming in contact with the devices.
Moreover the Animal Protection Act only prohibits the manufacture, sale, import, export and display of traps, but not ownership — a legal loophole that many people exploit, he said.
“Faced with the threat of their traps being seized, some people simply tell authorities that they had bought the traps long ago and that they are only keeping them in storage,” he said.
In 2016, the Kaohsiung City Government was the first in the nation to introduce a municipal ordinance that closed this loophole by banning ownership of traps, he said.
City authorities informed the local hardware association about the ordinance and conducted random inspections of association members, he said.
However, the law is difficult to enforce in remote mountain communities, he said.
Every year the Kaohsiung Animal Protection Office offers free vaccination shots for rabies and other diseases to pet owners in remote rural communities.
In the process of administering vaccines it usually encounters pets with severed limbs, which their owners say were caused by the pets running off into the mountains and forests, the office said.
“Some of the traps are made by people on their own. This is just something you cannot guard against,” Ni said.
The office cooperates with local government offices and civic animal protection groups to search for traps in the mountains, and posts signage along mountain trails to remind the public that traps are illegal, he said.
The Animal Protection Act stipulates that those found making, selling, importing, exporting or exhibiting traps may be fined up to NT$75,000 (US$2,436), while Kaohsiung’s municipal ordinance prohibiting trap ownership stipulates a fine of NT$15,000.
If the use of a trap results in the death or debilitation of an animal, the owner of the trap may be fined up to NT$2 million and face up to two years in prison, as stipulated in Article 25 of the act, Animal Protection Office director Yeh Kun-sung (葉坤松) 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater