The Animal Protection Act

We continue to learn more in regards to the Animal Protection program. One of the criteria is to understand how we can protect the animals through the law *in Taiwan*, the Animal Protection Act.

Please brace yourself as this will be one of those blog with longer sentences compared to my usual photogenic post as I want to explain more detail regarding what I've learned from this session with Profession Jason.

This is professor Jason L.S. Yeh from the Institute of Veterinary Clinical Sciences, National Taiwan University. He gave us a whole day session on the Animal Protection Act and Stray dog ecology in Taiwan.

Another 7 eleven breakfast of the day!

We had a great learning experience with Professor Jason. He explain the differences between Animal Protection and Animal Conservation. Put in simple words means that protecting them from being harm/extinct and protecting their natural habitat is two different things and Animal Conservation might just be the hardest things to do as civilization grows, more natural habitat are being destroyed to satisfy the demand of land for development.

When he was talking about animal cruelty, violation of animal rights. Every country seems to be pointing their fingers at each other but are we that different?
He showed us pictures of many different countries using all kinds of inhumane method killing the animals to solve stays problems. Killing animals for their fur/skin which in reality is an unnecessary to us humans. Using cruel method in training the animals for human entertainment purpose.

René Descartes

He also did mentioned René Descartes who are the 'enemy' to all animals lovers because of his philosophy saying that animals are without rationality, that they cannot feel pain therefore practice vivisection on animal to "explore" how body works is alright.

He said that screening and crying of animal when being cut alive are nothing but "noice of machines". Can you even imagine yourself in that monkey position. It is sad to know such cruelty exist.

But thanks for Peter Singer who wrote a book entitle Animal Lliberation which is widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. His philosophy was in direct contrast with  René Descartes where he argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to feel suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them.

 He is like a hero to all Animal Lovers =)

Another interesting topic is the Scope of Justice. Everyone has their own scope of justice, for example if someone who is not within your scope of justice got hurt you might not feel sad, you might not feel anything, you might even feel happy.

This concept applies to the animals too. If your own dog got sick, you will personally take it to a vet to be treated. This is because it is within your scope of justice. But if just a chicken among the thousand got sick in a farm, the management might just terminate it or even perform vivisection on it to find out the cause.

Numbers seriously matters. It's ok to care for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 animals around us. But if you have too much especially in one place.

It is not possible to include all of them in your scope of justice.

Anyways moving on to the Animal Protection Act (APA). It is interesting that Taiwan made 7 amendments to the Act within a short period of 11 years. I'm not from a law background but according to the Prof, usually Law requires a very long period of time/years before amendments can be done. This shows the previous APA are just not as efficient nor effective, causing a lot of protest among those animal lovers.

Here's some news links I found in regards to the APA amendments.

Prof Jason 'feeding' birdy his straw~

Birdy don't like straw so it poop on the table~ ZZzzz

Most of us make full use of our resting session during break time  =)

Especially Bato...haha

Even the smell of our delicious lunch can't wake him...oh well~

After lunch we continue to our next session in regards to the Stay Dog Ecology in Taiwan. We discuss about the overpopulation of stray dogs and the impact of this upon the society such as city image problem, garbage, biting, noise pollution, disease and so on.

We were also reminded on how human used animals for centuries for so many reasons like guarding, guiding, showing even gambling etc. It is also one of the reasons we should show gratitude and appreciation to these amazing animals.

So to help solve the stray problems TNR was introduced. Though it is not a perfect solution but it was one of the best ones so far, and it is proven to be effective towards improving the stays issue in the city.

Our group photos taken inside the Taipei Animal Shelter

Finally we got our internet connection in the apartment!! =)

*7 of us were disconnected for more than 24 hours after moving into our 'new home'* Here's the post regarding that~