Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) yesterday visited one of the first companies in Taiwan, Shih An Farms (石安牧場), to have used EU standard techniques for raising egg-laying hens humanely and said that the council would promote the practice across the nation.
In February, civic animal welfare group Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) revealed that an inhumane and unhealthy practice was prevalent in many chicken coops in Taiwan: that of raising two to four egg-laying hens in a battery cage only slightly bigger than a sheet of A4 paper and often injecting the birds with antibiotics or other drugs to enhance their growth.
According to the European Union Council Directive 1999/74/EC passed in 1999, the EU took more than ten years to phase out and ban the conventional battery hen cages across Europe.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
About 36.5 million egg-laying hens are raised in Taiwan each year, but most are kept in small cages without enough space to move, the company said, showing that the new hen-rearing facilities built according to the EU standard contained a nesting area, a resting space, a scratching area and a playground, with each hen being given at least 750cm2 of moving space.
“We are happy to see a company that can already achieve the EU standard,” Chen said. “And we hope that the example this company sets can attract more people to adopt more humane practices of hen-raising.”
However, when responding to whether Taiwan will also adopt regulations to ban the use of battery cages, Chen said: “It took the EU countries about twenty years to achieve the current situation of banning battery hen cages, but not all chicken coops have installed such advanced facilities.”
“Our research institutes will begin conducting research to figure out whether the imported facilities are adaptable to the climate and hen-raising practices of Taiwan, and after at least one-and-a-half years [the time needed for an egg-laying hen to grow] if the results are positive, the council will promote such practices” Chen said, adding that he “hopes to see the industry move in that direction.”
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS