The adoption of stray animals should be included in evaluations of school performance, animal rights advocates said yesterday, announcing the results of a national survey of school adoptions.
“When the Ministry of Education evaluates a school’s ‘life education,’ one of the measures it should include is whether they have adopted a stray animal,” Animal Protection Administration Oversight Committee board member Wang Wei-chi (王唯治) told a press conference in Taipei.
“You can not just say there are exams on related material, you need to show cases demonstrating that your ‘life education’ is a success,” Wang said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
In addition to adopting stray animals, schools could also be evaluated based on how many students were involved in caring for the animal and reports on what they had learned, he said.
Wang added that schools were the key to increasing animal adoption rates. By familiarizing students with the needs of adopted animals and also increasing parents confidence that their children could be responsible for an animal’s care, more animals might be adopted.
He said that more than 90,000 stray animals were caught last year nationally, with many animals euthanized if they are not adopted within 15 days.
Life Conservationist Association executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) said that with the euthanasia of animals scheduled to be banned in two years, the group has been working to promote animal adoption, focusing on neighborhoods as well as the nation’s 3,885 elementary and secondary schools.
A survey conducted by the group showed that about 6 percent of the nation’s schools have adopted a cat or a dog, with 12 percent of high schools and middle schools raising a pet, compared with only 3 percent of elementary schools.
Keelung had the highest adoption rate of 18.2 percent, while Taipei had the lowest at 3.5 percent.
Ministry of Education offical Chiu Jen-chieh (邱仁杰) said the ministry had already passed regulations regarding animals being adopted by schools and includes animal protection information in the school curriculum.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS