Animal protection activists yesterday again urged the government to ban the import and sale of seal oil in Taiwan to help stop the slaughter of the marine mammal.
BOYCOTT DRIVE
The Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) has been promoting a campaign calling for the boycott of seal and sea lion products since April.
The drive has succeeded in getting the products off the shelves of retail chains including Cosmed, Watsons, Pxmart and Wellcome. The online health product retailer Holy Dot Com has also stopped supplying the products, EAST officials said. However, the products are still being sold by online retailers including Momo Shop, ETmall and PChome Online, they added.
Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of the Canada chapter of Humane Society International, told a press conference in Taipei that the US, the EU, Mexico and Croatia have all banned imports of seal oil and she said she hoped Taiwan would follow suit.
TAIWANESE MARKET
With Canada’s annual seal hunt set to begin in four months, imposing the ban would allow Taiwan to contribute to protecting seals, Aldworth said.
According to EAST, Taiwan is the fourth-largest market for Canadian seal products. From 2003 to last year, it imported 431,364kg of seal oil, an amount requiring the killing of 120,000 seals.
In a video shown at the press conference, a Canadian hunter was seen bludgeoning a seal pup with a cudgel before throwing the dying animal onto a boat.
A Council of Agriculture (COA) official said an EAST-backed petition calling for the ban of seal oil had been signed by 160,000 people.
After the petition has been submitted to the COA, the council will consider the proposal and notify the Bureau of Foreign Trade of any decision made, the official said.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Celebrations marking Double Ten National Day are to begin in Taipei today before culminating in a fireworks display in Yunlin County on the night of Thursday next week. To start the celebrations, a concert is to be held at the Taipei Dome at 4pm today, featuring a lineup of award-winning singers, including Jody Chiang (江蕙), Samingad (紀曉君) and Huang Fei (黃妃), Taipei tourism bureau official Chueh Yu-ling (闕玉玲) told a news conference yesterday. School choirs, including the Pqwasan na Taoshan Choir and Hngzyang na Matui & Nahuy Children’s Choir, and the Ministry of National Defense Symphony Orchestra, flag presentation unit and choirs,
China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday. China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday. The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said. The documents
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