Taiwanese are spending more money on their pets, whether for grooming aids, health care, or even the occasional fine. Is this just another byproduct of economic prosperity, or does it mean that attitudes are fundamentally changing?
It takes a long time for animal welfare to catch on. England first began to take the topic seriously in 1822, when someone successfully sued a farmer for mistreating a cow, and its world-renowned Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was not established for another three years after that. The first law designed to protect animals only reached the UK statute book in 1911. So it took England, one of the most successful nations in the realm of animal protection, almost a century to put a proper system in place.
Taiwan still has a long way to go in its journey toward creating a society where concern for animal welfare becomes an integral part of the way people think, and where veterinarians enjoy a professional status almost on a par with that of physi cians. But at least things are changing. Activists may criticize the government for its seeming indifference to the problem of cruelty to animals, but public awareness of the issue is growing fast. Higher standards of living, coupled with the emergence of a "conservation consciousness," mean that nowadays many people, especially members of the younger generation, are adopting responsible attitudes toward their pets.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this improvement better than the growth in the number of animal hospitals. According to the Council of Agriculture (COA), there are roughly 1,800 of them islandwide, and their number is increasing. The role of veterinarians is changing too, with many of them in the frontline of the fight against animal cruelty.
"Just take a walk anywhere and you'll find a lot of animal hospitals providing customers' domestic pets with 'beauty -parlor' services--shampooing, tinting, ear-cleaning and so on," says Zhu Jiang-guang, director of the Kindness Veterinary Hospital in Taipei. "This alone shows that people are more willing to spend money on their pets to improve the quality of their lives."
In the past, residents tended to see animals of all kinds exclusively from the economic point of view, as just another source of potential profit. "Nowadays, they're more likely to regard pets as friends and companions," says Zhu, who is confident that animals are getting a much better deal currently as far as their welfare and protection are concerned. His belief is borne out by people like Huang Chih-kuan, 33, a resident of Taoyuan. "I love my dog," he says. "I usually take him with me when I go hiking at the weekend. I don't keep track of what I spend on him. He's one of the family."
Liang Sao-ling, a fellow of the National Taiwan Veterinary Hospital in Taipei, agrees. But, he goes on, "when owners are willing to spend a lot of money on caring for their pets, the question is: Can our veterinary hospitals provide them with the quality of service they expect? Given our limited financial resources, we find it difficult to buy advanced equipment from abroad, for example."
Liang also believes that the role of the veterinarian is changing in Taiwan. "As in most advanced industrial countries, we're becoming animal health counselors, rather than people who treat diseases," he says. He conceives the real underlying purpose of today's animal hospital to be the provision of a high-quality medical environment to owners and their pets.
Many professionals still see a big gap between conditions in the cities and in the countryside. "Generally speaking, the idea of animal protection has made giant strides," Zhu Jiang-guang says. "But when you go to rural areas, people there are less concerned about it. Some of the older folks just aren't interested. For them, financial profit is still the prime considera tion." Not all of those "older folks" live in the countryside, though. "I won't spend a lot of money and time on this thing," says Yang Chen-shan, 66, a resident of Panchiao city, talking about his dog. "It's just an animal, after all. Why should I? If it needs something, I'll take care of it then."
Huang Ching-jung, director of Hua Xin Veterinary Hospital, Taipei, points out that the charging structure also varies between town and country. "In the cities, people are willing to pay high prices for medical treatment if you can satisfy them that you're doing a good job," he says. "In the countryside, on the other hand, people won't do that. They only look at the practical aspects: Is it expensive? Is this dog or cat worth the cost of the treatment?" The transformation in the structure of Taiwan society has also contributed to this change; for instance, in the cities, the number of single-parent families is increas ing, and there are more lonely old folk than hitherto. Those are precisely the kinds of people who become responsible, caring pet owners.
But Yeh Yin-chiung, deputy manager of the Loving Kindness Veterinary Hospital in Tainan, southern Taiwan, takes a different view. "The increase in the number of animal hospitals represents a big change in our society," he says. "Although this hospital is in [traditionally less prosperous] southern Taiwan, people here are getting much better." David Cheng, Loving Kindness's vice president, agrees and offers two examples: Pet owners in his catchment area have been receptive to the government's policy of promoting microchip implants for registered pets; and he has noted a marked decline in the popularity of a traditional charitable concept called fang sheng , which encourages people to release captured animals and thus gain spiritual merit. This sounds humane, but in the past it often caused environmental problems, the result of throwing ecosys tems out of kilter, that the government ended up having to solve. The COA now actively discourages the concept.
Pet sterilization is another success story. "In the countryside, let's be honest, people don't exactly have to fight with hordes of stray dogs for space," Huang Ching-jung says. "But most of them have already accepted the concept of sterilization for their pets, even in southern Taiwan." In the future, he hopes the government will subsidize microchip ID implants, which would give more of a boost to the registration drive than the current fines for non compliance, which range from NT$2,000 up to $10,000 (US$65 to $325).
There are signs of growing public concern over the quality of veterinarians and the hospitals they staff. Are they keeping pace with their customers' revised expectations? "Traditionally, Taiwan was an agricultural society that emphasized the importance of farm animals such as cows, pigs, and chickens," says Zhu Jiang-guang of the Kindness Veterinary Hospital. "So there was good quality research and treatment available for those animals. But nobody devoted much time and attention to domestic pets, not even during veterinary training."
Hua Xin's Huang Ching-jung believes that pet owners do not have a lot of faith in veterinarians, and that this is largely the fault of the island's education system. In Taiwan, it takes a student five years to qualify as a vet, four of them spent in the classroom and one in the laboratory. After that, candidates must pass an exam. Currently, only four of the island's universities offer veterinary courses. Once qualified, however, vets are pretty much bulletproof. According to the COA, the only "profes sional" offense they can commit is to lease out their license to unqualified practitioners, and even then the only penalty is a fine rather than an order striking them off.
Because nobody is responsible for monitoring professional standards in the veterinary profession, when things go wrong pet owners are usually forced to come to some financial arrangement with the culpable vet. "Vets know people won't go to court over a dog or a cat," says Hua Xin Veterinary Hospital's Huang Ching-jung. "If something happens, they just offer to compensate the customer."
The absence of on-the-job training is another worrisome aspect of the domestic pet market. "Teachers still focus on farm animals," Huang says. "The government won't approve or subsidize a research project unless you can demonstrate that it's likely to boost economic efficiency. So there's no incentive for today's teachers to harp on 'respect for life' ideas." He adds that regulations do not oblige students who pass the examinations and receive their certificates from the COA to spend a mandatory period in clinical practice before hanging out their own shingles. In such an environment, veterinarians usually end up learning how to take care of domestic pets via a mix of self-education and on-the-job experience.
Huang Pin-han is the director of the Provet Veterinary Hospital in Yungho, near Taipei. He points out three difficulties that his profession is facing in the field of pet medicine. The market is too small to justify the import of expensive medicines from overseas. People are reluctant to accept that if they want superior medical treatment for their animals, they will have to pay a correspondingly higher fee. And the government is reluctant to spend money to help Taiwanese veterinarians develop their own science. "So far, we've done very little for ourselves and have to rely on research papers written by foreign scholars," says Wang Ching-chao, president of the Loving Kindness Veterinary Hospital. "The government doesn't seem to have a comprehensive policy here. It's still focusing exclusively on economic development." According to him, the trouble is that people do not really class veterinarians as professionals.
In the United States, on the other hand, veterinarians are accorded a much higher status. For example, in Taiwan newly qualified vets can expect to earn anything between NT$30,000 to $50,000 (US$970 to $1,615) a month, while their US counterparts earn five or six times that. David Cheng, Loving Kindness's vice president, believes that the situation is improv ing, however, and Huang Pin-han confirms that a lot of Taiwanese veterinarians who went abroad for postgraduate study are returning home and taking teaching jobs in universities or setting up their own practices.
Why promote animal rights in the first place? Many people believe that all life is unique and worthy of esteem, irrespec tive of whether it can be said to be "useful." The Life Conservationist Association certainly subscribes to that view, and has been devoting itself to promoting animal protection in Taiwan since 1993. The association's president, Buddhist Master Shing-kuang, believes that it is in everyone's interest to maintain a wide variety of animal species. "By appealing to people's self-interest, we will gradually get them to understand the importance of animal conservation," she says. "We have to remem ber that our resources on this planet are finite."
Taiwan's transition from being an authoritarian regime to a prosperous humanitarian society is still in train, bringing many changes both great and small. But has the emergence of a prosperous middle class really done anything to popularize the idea that animals have rights too? Shing-kuang does not think so. "Caring for animals isn't a rational response, it's simply a manifestation of love," she says. "In rural areas, economic considerations are of prime importance and the concept of animal protection is vague for many farmers, but they do in fact love the animals they raise very much. They treat and protect them well throughout their lifetimes."
Shing-kuang believes that actually it is in the urban areas of modern industrial society that people treat animals as mere numbers on a balance sheet, for example in battery breeding farms. "That's going against the central idea of animal protec tion," she argues. Nor does she see the dramatic increase in the number of animal hospitals as related to growing acceptance of the need to be kind to animals. "It was simply a result of increased consumption generally and market supply."
In other words, urbanites have time and money to spend, while people living in agricultural communities do not enjoy that luxury. Shing-kuang also thinks this is another reason why young people have a reputation for caring about animal welfare, the other factors being improved education and a greater readiness to accept foreign thinking than their parents. "They just have more spending power," she says. "Actually, they don't really know how to spend their money."
The promulgation of the Animal Protection Law in November 1998 marked a new phase in the animal protection movement. The preamble states that "this law is enacted to protect animals and increase respect for their lives." Even so, it has come under strong criticism from activists. "In effect, this law empowered the government to slaughter certain animals legitimately," says Hua Xin's Huang Ching-jung. "For instance, pets without microchip IDs, or strays that aren't claimed within seven days of being caught, can all be put down. It's ironic--those pets are victims of the law."
Master Shing-kuang agrees. "A dog belonging to one of my friends was playing in front of her house without a leash. It was trapped by the dog-catcher, and although she got it back, the dog died a few days later, of shock. My friend was so depressed. That dog didn't benefit from the law, it was just another victim."
This story, harrowing though it is, does highlight a number of difficulties facing animal welfare activists in Taiwan. First of all, it is common for dog owners to let their pets run on the streets no matter how much they love them. Second, many dog owners still retain the old-fashioned and highly irresponsible notion that it is acceptable to abandon a dog when you are tired of it. And third, the attitude that a law designed to protect animals has turned them into victims is very prevalent here on account of the perceived "double whammy"--the trauma of capture, followed by summary execution. Rounding up hordes of stray dogs will do nothing to alter such entrenched attitudes, particularly the last, which seems to be based on a misunder standing of the law's rationale.
"Well, I don't understand the law," says Taso Lin-jen, a housewife in Panchiao city. "In fact, I don't even know what this law says. I've never heard the government say anything about it." How did she hear of it, then? From a newspaper report--and she is far from being the only one. "I heard about this law from the television, but I don't know its content," says Wu Yu-yin, who manages a fast-food restaurant in Hsinyin. "The government's got to work a lot harder for people." Indeed, Wu believes that the real purpose of this law is to show other countries that Taiwan is an advanced sort of place when it comes to animal protection. COA officials, on the other hand, say they are indeed trying harder, promoting and explaining the law through the island's school system, but that such reforms take time.
Vets on the frontline point to another weakness in the law's operation: The maximum penalty it imposes on violators who abuse animals is a fine of NT$250,000 (US$8,065). "A lot of people here are actually very rich. They're not the least bit afraid of a fine," says Huang Ching-jung. "Some people even boast about it. It's very strange." According to him, the govern ment needs to take another look at this law in the near future, preferably after detailed discussions between the COA and legislators.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to reforming people's attitudes. "I often get to the hospital in the morning and find that somebody's abandoned a dog there overnight," Zhu Jiang-guang says sadly. "I call that my voluntary work. I believe a lot of other vets feel the same way." According to him, the most important aspect of his work is changing people's ways of thinking. "It's very serious," he says. And progress can sometimes be very, very slow.