Action Alliance / Please encourage the Changhua County Magistrate to show courage, and not let partisan representatives' boycott allow animals to continue suffering
Text / Taiwan Animal Social Research Association
Walking into the Changhua Yuanlin shelter located next to a garbage dump, one is greeted by age, darkness, and a pungent odor.This old shelter, already in use for 20 years, offers extremely poor housing quality, and because it sits in a remote location that is hard for the public to reach, the adoption rate is extremely low.
Two years ago, the Changhua Animal Disease Control Center finally secured more than 73 million in funding to build a new home, right beside Xizhou Park with its convenient transportation, yet local elected representatives blocked the construction on the grounds that the "location was unsuitable." Construction has now been halted for more than 3 months, with no date in sight for resuming work.
Please encourage the Changhua County magistrate not to give up on improving stray animal shelter quality just because of a boycott by local elected representatives
"Look at shelters in advanced countries: their locations are always conveniently accessible, making it easy for the public to reach them, to volunteer on holidays, and to adopt animals," said Chen Yumin, director of the Taiwan Animal Social Research Association, who helped lobby elected representatives and local figures to understand the shelter plan. A shelter is not just a holding place, she said; it also has an important life-education function. When the public comes to learn what animal welfare is, it also helps control the problem at its source and strengthens owner responsibility. "Right now, Taiwan generally lacks owner responsibility."
Chen Yumin stressed that if people who come to Xizhou Park to see the flowers also stop by for a lesson to understand dog and cat behavior and the things to keep in mind when keeping pets, the new shelter would become an excellent venue for life education. "Compared with the current Yuanlin shelter, which is simply a place the public will never go, it is just locking dogs up until they die."
Please join us in encouraging Magistrate Wei not to give up the opportunity to improve the quality of stray animal shelters in Changhua just because a small number of local elected representatives are boycotting the project. We ask the magistrate to actively communicate and cooperate with local elected representatives, and through good planning to build both the software and hardware facilities of the stray animal shelter well, so as to raise animal welfare and implement owner responsibility and life education, tackling the problem from multiple angles to reduce the number of stray animals at the source