In today’s Taipei Times…
Chia Hung-chiu is a hero, and Terry Gou is making the difference, hopefully to be followed by other industry leaders and/or public figures. Now it’s up to Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei to follow up on this promise. When will the killing cease? Do the new shelters have to be built first? I’ll try and find out how and where we can apply ‘pressure’…
Yeah, great, except that the Taipei County government is using the offer of assistance to make a COLOSAL (sp?) money-grab. I don’t know where to find this article in English, but the Chinese papers are reporting that the Taipei County government quoted some utterly ridiculous figure like umpteen hundred million a year, based on a completely bogus price list which contains, among other things, 900 NT per month feeding costs and 600 a month in “skin care” PER DOG! (If it cost that much, with my eight dogs I’d be flat broke!!!)
Dog people are up in arms and my wife has been calling every KMT official she can get ahold of. When I get specifics regarding this story I will post them here…
This isn’t such great news. All those resources spent on buckets to catch drips when what we should be doing is fixing the leak. Those buckets will fill up in no time and overflow, and then we’ll have exactly the same problem, but all our resources tied up.
Promoting neutering is the only way.
I totally agree that we need to promote neutering, but they (no-kill shelters and neutering) are NOT mutually exclusive. We all know that it will take some time (understatement mode) to get 67% of the stray population neutered, what with 10,000 pets dumped per year in Taipei alone. In the meantime, every dog NOT killed is a life saved.
That’s my 0.02.
Guo is no longer supporting his initial no-kill position. He will, however, still be spending the money and given his reputation as a businessman I’m sure they will be efficiently run. It appears from the article below that he will also be investing in awareness-raising campaigns. He is well aware of the need to stop the problem at the source – with neutering and chipping of dogs.
savedogs.org/forum/article_v … ?f_no=3004
Chia has had a noisy falling out with Guo because his new shelters will euthanize a proportion of the dogs.
Life is complicated. People with good intentions do things that are not perhaps the best for the long-term welfare of the animals they love. I feel like Chia might be one of those who have lost perspective on what is precious about life. She hoards more than a hundred dogs, but they are not living in tolerable conditions.