A shortage of sniffer dogs for the inspection of cross-strait flights is leaving glaring holes in the nation’s quarantine procedures, the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said.
The bureau said the shortage meant that there were no dogs available to check direct cross-strait flights at Taichung’s Chingchuankang Airport.
Even at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport — the airport with the most inspection dogs — luggage from 65 percent of the flights is unchecked because of the shortage, bureau officials said.
According to the bureau, there are 23 inspection dogs countrywide: 15 at Taoyuan airport, four at Kaohsiung International Airport, two in Kinmen and two at the Taipei Postal Center, while four are still in training and will only be able to start working in September.
At Taoyuan airport, the nation’s largest airport, four of the 15 dogs are working in the cargo area, leaving 11 — including the retired dog Dalton, who was wounded on duty last week — to inspect passenger flights.
While more than 200 flights per day land at the Taoyuan airport, an inspection dog is only able to check luggage from seven or eight flights, leaving 65 percent of all flights unchecked.
The bureau said that many passengers exploited the loophole to smuggle illegal animal or plant products into the country by finding periods of time during which there are fewer or no inspection dogs at work.
Figures released by the bureau show inspection dogs discovered nearly 40 tonnes of illegal animal or farm products last year. While the dogs uncovered 73 percent of the illegal products that were found, customs officers accounted for 25 percent and 2 percent were declared by travelers themselves.
The increase in the number of arrivals brought about by the direct cross-strait flights has prompted the bureau to request to train more inspection dogs, but its request for an additional budget allocation has been turned down.
Training one inspection dog costs between NT$400,000 and NT$500,000 (US$13,000 and US$16,000), and the annual budget for dog trainers’ salaries is around NT$20 million, a bureau official said.
Warren Kuo (郭華仁), an agronomy professor at National Taiwan University, said that the government would have much more to lose if it tried to save money on the inspection dog budget.
Kuo said he was worried that direct cross-strait flights may cause enormous damage to agriculture if the number of inspection dogs is not increased.
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