Taiwanese are joining a campaign en mass to petition China's leader to use his official capacity to save bears from cruel treatment, an animal welfare group said yesterday.
More than 100,000 Taiwanese have written postcards urging Chinese President Jiang Zemin (
The society started distributing postcards in Taiwan on Nov. 20 as part of a worldwide campaign against bear farming in China -- an initiative launched by the UK-based World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).
According to EAST's chief, Chen Yu-min (
"Up to 10,000 black bears, almost half of the black bears in China, are kept in tiny cages at bear farms," Chen said yesterday, urging the Chinese government to take action immediately.
Chen also said that the campaign was significant to Taiwan -- as the hunting and killing of bears here still continues.
"We are glad that more and more Taiwanese people ... are actively joining the campaign," Chen said, adding that some elementary school students even requested more than 100 postcards each in order to pass them to friends and classmates.
Meanwhile, local media criticized Taiwan's Council of Agriculture (
"Just how many black bears do we have?" reports asked yesterday, "Perhaps none of our officials can answer this question."
According to local media, no conservation research on Taiwan's black bears had been conducted until Huang Mei-hsiu (
"The outlook for Taiwan's black bears is bleak. The total number of indigenous black bears number less than 40 now," Huang said.
According to Huang's research, two out of 15 bears she studied lacked a paw and all the others were injured in some way, showing that Taiwan's black bears were still being hunted.
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