The Animal Rescue Team Taiwan (ARTT) on Monday accused government bureaucracy of having killed a cat and called on the personnel involved to be punished.
The organization said that earlier that day, it received a report from a Feng Chia University student that local government officials on Wednesday last week failed to save a cat from dying out in the heat.
The student said he had found a cat inside an animal trap at Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) substation in Taichung’s Situn District (西屯) and that he was worried it might die of heatstroke, as it was around noon and very hot.
He said he called the substation and was told to call Taipower’s customer service line, but that Taipower customer service referred him back to the substation.
The student said that he called the Taichung City Animal Protection and Health Inspection Office at about 1pm, and that an official from the office came to the site, but said that there was nothing that could be done.
Before leaving, the official recommended that he call the Taichung Citizen 1999 Hotline, the student said.
He had to go to class, but when he returned to the site at about 5pm, the cat was dead, apparently due to the heat, the student said, adding that he was saddened by how the government treated a living animal.
ARTT spokesman Antony Ni (倪京台) said that using live animal traps to capture cats and dogs is a safe method, but that there should be someone in charge of regularly checking the traps, especially when the temperature rises above 30°C, which can cause a captured animal to experience dehydration or heat exhaustion, or even cause its death.
Taipower and the animal protection office did not treat the cat as a living being and shirked their responsibility by passing the problem on to someone else, leading to the loss of a life, Ni said, calling on the city government to punish the officials involved for contravening the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法).
Taipower’s Taichung branch said that stray cats often enter the substation, climb onto the power equipment and cause power failures, so it has installed live animal traps to capture them and set them free far from the substation.
The substation had received a report about a cat, but the message had not clarified that the “cat was caught in a trap,” the branch said, adding that the inspector in charge of patroling the substation was needed at another substation and left without checking, possibly thinking that the cat had gone elsewhere because there had been no report of an accident.
The Taichung branch apologized for the incident, saying that it would review how it handles such situations so that a stable power supply can be maintained while also respecting life.
It might increase the number of inspections or add surveillance cameras, it said.
The Taichung City Animal Protection and Health Inspection Office said its inspector went to the site after the student’s call, but could not enter the substation because it was locked.
The city government would punish the inspector for failing to ask for assistance, it said, adding that it would improve personnel training and send an inspector to the substation so that the office can learn more about its procedures.
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