The Taichung District Court last week sentenced an undocumented Vietnamese migrant worker to eight years and two months in prison for illegally hunting and selling a stray cat and an endangered leopard cat.
The defendant, Ban Khac Hiep, was convicted of contravening the Firearms, Ammunition and Knives Control Act (槍砲彈藥刀械管制條例) and the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法).
Photo: Chen Chien-chih, Taipei Times
He was also fined NT$240,000.
The ruling can be appealed.
Ban absconded from his legal place of work in October 2020 and later made a homemade hunting gun, which he used to hunt wildlife illegally for profit in March and April last year, prosecutors said.
He enlisted the help of an accomplice, Pham Van Cuong, to arrange the sale of the animals, prosecutors said.
On March 13 last year, Ban killed a stray cat and sold it through Pham to a buyer, with the two together reaping NT$1,500 in proceeds.
Ban shot and killed a leopard cat — a protected species in Taiwan — on April 19 last year, and again asked Pham to find a buyer.
The following day, Pham's Vietnamese girlfriend, surnamed Nguyen, delivered the leopard cat carcass to a buyer and collected NT$3,000.
Nguyen later received deferred prosecution, while Pham was sentenced in November last year to one year in prison for contravening the Wildlife Conservation Act.
Police investigating the case attempted to arrest Ban on June 4 last year at a makeshift structure in Taichung's Sinshe District (新社).
Officers said Ban aimed his modified firearm at them and fled while they withdrew to seek backup.
He was later apprehended and indicted.
In its ruling handed down on Wednesday last week, the court said that leopard cats are a rare and protected species in Taiwan, and that Ban showed disregard for animal life by killing and selling both a stray cat and protected wildlife.
The court said the offenses were serious and warranted a substantial sentence.
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