About a dozen people from a community college and an animal rights group gathered at the Council of Agriculture yesterday to present a petition urging the council to put an immediate stop to the slaughter of poultry in traditional markets.
Students from Taipei City Wenshan Community College, accompanied by college president Cheng Hsiu-chuan (鄭秀娟), teacher and lawyer Tien Meng-chieh (田蒙潔) and representatives from the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST), asked the council to explain why a proclamation prohibiting the slaughter of poultry in traditional markets that was to be announced in April 2008 was first postponed and finally abandoned last year.
EAST executive director Wu Hung (朱增宏) said the Executive Yuan announced a policy -prohibiting all poultry slaughter and selling of live poultry in traditional markets in August 2006 — a policy that should have come into force in April 2008 and for which related government agencies had planned supporting budgets.
Photo: CNA
However, the council postponed the implementation of the policy in 2008 for another two years, saying preparations had been insufficient, Wu said.
The council then changed its policy last year by announcing that poultry could be slaughtered at registered market stands, he said.
The advocates said the prohibition related not just to animal welfare, but was also a way of preventing the spread of avian influenza and ensuring sanitary conditions.
Tien said the new proclamation violated the Animal Industry Act (畜牧法) and the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), and that according to the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法), when a proclamation is in violation of the law, it should be invalidated.
Peng Ming-hsing (彭明興), deputy director of the Meat Inspection Division at the council’s Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, accepted the petition and promised to make a formal response within a month.
Responding to a student question as to why prohibition could not be enforced, Peng said the council had considered many elements, including the receding risks of an epidemic, traditional customs favoring fresh native chicken meat and the fact that certain big cities, such as New York City, still allow the slaughter of fresh poultry.
Council data from last year show there are 62 registered poultry slaughterhouses in Taiwan, which handle about 120 million chickens every year.
Moreover, the council provided subsidies of NT$4.18 million (US$138,000) to 13 slaughterhouses from 2002 to 2004 and NT$216 million to 22 slaughterhouses from 2006 and 2007.
The council has made an effort to support the establishment of legal slaughterhouses and conducted regular examinations on the more than 1,000 registered poultry slaughter stands to ensure the strictest sanitary standards were maintained, Peng said.
He added that there had been a clear change in consumer preferences because the number of registered stands had dropped to 1,163 in September, or 523 stands less than in May.
The animal rights advocates said they would consider taking legal action if the formal response from the council failed to address their concerns.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS