Last week, a Taipei mayoral candidate spoke at a Pet Commerce Association event. In his remarks, he used the politically correct slogan “Adopt, Don’t Shop,” which drew a negative response from the pet industry, giving the candidate pause about whether he had just lost a vote or two.
He had good reason to be concerned, as the local elections are less than a month away. Candidates are caught between a rock and a hard place on the issue, trying to navigate their way between offending animal rights groups on one side and the pet industry on the other.
Candidates have proposed a string of policies aimed at wooing pet owners, but they all lack supporting details about how the measures would be paid for. It is therefore worth considering a “pet transaction tax.”
However, is it possible to find common ground between the pet industry’s reliance on selling animals and the adoption ideal?
In the 2016 book The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers are Transforming the Lives of Animals, Humane Society of the US president and CEO Wayne Pacelle offers some answers.
Pacelle writes that promoting humane values and changing people’s way of thinking creates new business models. In the US, for example, the pet industry in states that have banned the sale of pets in stores have not lost profit. Instead, entrepreneurs within the industry have created new business models.
For years, these businesses focused on selling goods and customer service, and it turned out that their sales improved and their revenue increased despite a ban on the sale of pets. Contrary to the concerns of the pet industry over such bans, the market has not shrunk, but instead grown.
Some say that the social, cultural and economic circumstances of the US are different from Taiwan. However, look at the development of animal welfare in Taiwan, particularly at how awareness of the issue has grown and how it has been economically beneficial to local businesses.
For the past couple of years, supermarket chains including Carrefour Taiwan and Pxmart have assigned valuable space in most of their stores for eggs from “free-range chickens.” Customers do care about the welfare of animals and that they are treated humanely.
In the Taiwanese pet industry, some entrepreneurs seeking to keep their businesses profitable asked the Taipei City Animal Protection Office not to promote adoption over buying pets.
Some ruthless pet breeders and dealers treat animals as cash cows, neglecting not only the welfare but also the dignity of the animals. When such horrendous incidents are reported in the media, the image of the pet industry is severely damaged and its reputation gradually erodes.
Given this, it is hardly surprising that the appeal for curtailing the pet trade has gradually gained ground. At the same time, disputes between the pet industry and animal rights groups have intensified.
The government must regulate the pet breeding and trading industry more attentively, and a pet transaction tax could be a sensible first step in that direction.
With such a policy, pet sellers and buyers would be held accountable for their actions. This stance echoes centrist liberalism: It does not oppose people’s freedom to purchase pets, while demanding that buyers be responsible for the environmental and social costs created by their actions.
When buyers are taxed under the proposal, they would be registered in a system overseen by the government. Moreover, a pet transaction tax would be levied only once, unlike the more common “pet tax” that could lead to pet owners abandoning their animals.
With a pet transaction tax, the movement to promote adoption could also embrace a policy with a mechanism based on price-oriented incentives.
In other words, those who want a smaller tax liability would adopt pets, and those who are able and willing to purchase would do so while taking more social responsibility.
In this way, Taiwan’s regulation and management of animal rights would cease being an intractable problem laden with moral issues, and become a public policy open for meaningful discussion.
Pan Han-shen is president of the Association of Taiwan Tree-huggers.
Translated by Liu Yi-hung
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