This case is almost a year old, but I can’t find any other thread discussing it. Last year, a PhD student from NTU was discovered to be adopting cats online and abusing and killing them. He was finally sentenced to 18 months in prison. Here’s a link to an article. globalvoicesonline.org/2010/04/0 … ayer-case/
Do you think that Taiwan’s animal abuse laws are too lenient or strict? In the US, animal abuse is a state crime. Louisiana has the strictest law of aggravated abuse having a possible penalty of up to a 25,000 USD fine and up to 10 years in prison.
Like most laws in Taiwan, the real issue is lack of enforcement.
Wow … I don’t want to read the details again cos it was horrible, but I remember that case. I’m really, really surprised he went to jail. The guy was clearly a textbook psychopath though. What amazed me about this particular case is that several people knew what was going on, and not one of them took it into his head to take the little scumbag outside one dark night and kick seven shades of shit out of him. I remember something similar back in England and the neighbours smashed his house and car to bits. I wonder if Taiwanese jails have the ‘it looks like I dropped the soap, you - new guy - go pick it up for me’ routine? Not that I’m condoning vigilante violence of course … 
… it’s just that the general public in Taiwan rarely express outrage or concern about bad behaviour in their immediate neighbourhood. And as Mucha Man points out, Taiwan has lots of perfectly good laws on the books, and none of them are enforced properly, so 99% of assholes like this continue to walk the streets inflicting misery on people and animals.
Anyway, to answer you question, it sounds like law enforcement is heading in the right direction. Animal abuse is wrong mainly because of the harm it does to the society that condones it. Would you want a guy who goes around hitting stray dogs with a baseball bat (for example - it happens) anywhere near your kids? Animal-rights laws simply bring home the point that we are supposed to be civilised beings.
I know these examples are far and few between, but it still made my day when I heard about it:
A while back close to McD’s at Fengchia (Taichung) there was an old, dingy looking and injured (if I remember correctly) stray dog laying close to the door, and as this guy (let’s call him Billy) and his girlfriend - who were walking their dog - walked by, Billy kicked the stray.
A guy saw it (let’s call him Joe) and told Billy off, who just shrugged and kept walking. A taxi-driver who had also seen it told Joe he’d testify to the police about it if he wanted to report it.
As Billy and his lass and dog had already vanished, Joe went on the ptt boards, posted about what happened, described Billy, his girl and their dog and what direction they walked off in, and within 24 hours the communal good of ptt had the address of these guys, and I believe Joe reported the incident to the police.
Now, I don’t know what happened afterwards (if anything), but I do appreciate Joe and the taxi driver actually reacting when it happened, and love that the ptt community rallied together to hunt them down successfully ~
[quote=“funkyjojo”]
I know these examples are far and few between[/quote]
Is this expression actually said this way in other parts of the world or did you accidentally get it backwards?
[quote]
A while back close to McD’s at Fengchia (Taichung) there was an old, dingy looking and injured (if I remember correctly) stray dog laying close to the door, and as this guy (let’s call him Billy) and his girlfriend - who were walking their dog - walked by, Billy kicked the stray.[/quote]
Was the stray dog acting vicious towards the guys dog? I often use my foot to shoo away strays the are being aggressive towards my dogs. I don’t actually kick them though. Although there this one time when this guy had his extremely vicious dog off the leash. The moment it saw my dog(who was on the leash), it bounded over and attacked him. While the were fighting, I tried to separate them with my feet, all the while the owner did nothing and seemed unconcerned. I finally created distance between them, but again the other owner did nothing to grab his dog, so it came right back to fight. Finally, I had had enough and I punted the dog clear across the alley. It then decided it didn’t want to fight anymore and ran across the street. There was blood on my dogs fur, but after closer inspection it seemed that it actually came from the other dog.
EDIT: Hmm…BBCode not working in this forum?
In that particular case you didn’t have a lot of choice … I assume you would have done the same to the owner if he’d been biting your dog. It’s just self-defence. Like the story about the tosspot who did actually get reported to the police; it’s funny how everyone moans about taxi drivers, but I’ve met more than a few very decent ones like that guy.
Nope. As legend has it he was just laying there minding his own business.
I’m glad the Taiwanese government finally response to animal cruelty by making a law. The general public is still very mean to animals. If you look into stray dog’s eyes, you can see fear. I think for Taiwanese to actually treat animal fairly will take a few generations. Up to today, I can still hear old lady yelling at your diabetes dog (my dog) “standing” on the street next to her house, because a sick dog doesn’t make her feel good.