Animal farm:
But it is still hard for attitudes which attach such high importance and status to animals, or which are overly extreme, to be accepted by the vast majority of people, who continually exploit animals and who look on man as "the wisest of all the creatures."
"Even people don't have proper welfare. What do you want with animal welfare?" is the response Hsia Liang-chou most often gets when he mentions animal welfare to other people. And how can humans tell what is good or bad for animals? Who can say just how big a cage has to be in order not to abuse an animal? How do you know whether an animal is being abused? So many people today shut themselves up in city flats not much bigger than birdcages, but aren't they still perfectly happy?
And to what lengths should animal welfare be taken? If in some countries chickens and ducks are all let out of their cages, shouldn't the pigs all be let out too? But this might cause the natural environment to be destroyed even faster, creating another even greater calamity. And should creatures such as cockroaches, which threaten human beings' living environment, also be treated with the same respect?
If I could talk to the animals:
Indeed, the laws regarding animal welfare are being applied with a sense of groping in the dark, says Hsia Liangchou, but the animal rights of which people speak today are already the product of utmost compromise.
In the normal workings of nature, all species coexist to mutual advantage, and today many extreme conservationists also recognize that as part of nature themselves, humans cannot avoid exploiting many forms of life. People have the right to propagate the concepts of strict vegetarianism or a complete ban on exploiting animals, but this does not make these concepts truth or law.
People and animals are all part of the biosphere, but humans hold the greatest power; furthermore, when the environment is damaged in the end it may be humans themselves who suffer, and it would do people no harm to take a little more care of animals' basic needs and to reduce their suffering when they are being "used."
This is why although there may be differences of degree in conservationists' attitudes, they are all working in the same general direction.
Some people take the view that unless animals themselves can speak out it will not be possible for anyone to devise what they would call a really comprehensive, equitable "animal welfare law." Nonetheless, research related to animal welfare is still on the increase. "It's not hard to understand the basic thinking behind this," says Hsia Liangchou, who has studied Western European animal welfare in depth. When speaking of animal welfare it is not good enough to make empty promises; apart from a basic considerate attitude of putting oneself in others' shoes or "not doing to others what one would not wish to be done to oneself," what is even more important is to strengthen research into animal ecology.
Do as you would be done by:
At England's London Zoo, the chimpanzees' food trough is placed outside the bars of their enclosure, and when the apes put out their hands to grasp food, they cannot pull them in again; but at the two ends of the trough the bars are more widely spaced, and so the chimpanzees slowly push their food to the ends before retrieving it. This arrangement is not made to tease the animals, but rather so that as far as possible their feeding conditions should involve an element of challenge as in the wild, and so that their life should not be too monotonous.
Just as convicts in prison have to be let out of their cells daily for exercise, animal behavioral scientists have discovered through long-term research that animals have special physiological responses to their surroundings. Hsia Liang-chou says that if many kinds of monkeys are caged for long periods, they will chew their own toenails completely away. If shut up too long in an enclosed space, they will become mentally abstracted, repeating a single movement over and over again. Animals caged up with nothing to do are not exposed to any stress at all, but this in itself may be an even greater form of stress.
Because of this, many zoos are gradually changing the ways they operate in the light of academic research, and although they cannot recreate the Fruit and Flower Mountain (the monkeys' paradise of Chinese legend), at least they can change iron bars for climbing rocks. Taipei's Mucha Zoo, fearing that the Formosan rock monkeys may suffer from boredom in their enclosure, gives them honeycombs and twigs to let them poke the honey out themselves lick by lick. Apart from helping them pass the time, having the monkeys spend time looking for food in this way also prevents them from suffering diarrhea or becoming obese from eating the honey all at once.
A dog's life:
Today, many countries have changed existing laws or enacted new ones in the interests of animal welfare. In 1989, Taiwan passed a "Wildlife Conservation Law" which is also based on a spirit of "animal welfare" and clearly stipulates that persons abusing protected wild animals and thereby causing their death may be imprisoned for up to one year. Today, "regulations for the rearing of wild animals" are being prepared in order to regulate rearers.
But for animals' welfare to receive genuine protection, what is really needed is surely a change in people's attitudes. This is even though as long as 3000 years ago China had the concepts of "all creatures coexisting," and "animals and ourselves are one," and Chuang-tzu often reminded people not to raise animals according to human concepts--which is almost the same as the basic thinking behind animal welfare today.
But turning animal abusers over to the courts is something which in Taiwan is still almost unheard of, just as although child welfare legislation has been passed, when people hear their neighbors beating their children they still say "What right have we to interfere in the way other people raise their children?" Not long ago television showed a star dog which carried on performing despite having to be put on an intravenous drip between shows because the physical strain was too much for it; but there are probably not many people who would regard this as animal abuse.
Recently newspaper reports of "dog shrinking" techniques have caused quite a stir, reporting that pet shops are selling drugs which can stop dogs from growing large; if this is true then under the animal protection laws the shop owners could be prosecuted, but unfortunately dogs have not made it onto the list of protected species.
Taking the example of the Formosan rock monkeys raised by Huang Han-fu of Changhua City, after three of the monkeys died the county government could have prosecuted him for abusing animals to death.
But to throw somebody in prison for shutting up monkeys would probably elicit the public reaction that the county government was unreasonable and making a mountain out of a molehill. Many people feel that it was punishment enough for Huang Han-fu, after having spent so much money on caring for 100 or more monkeys, to have been banned from trading the animals to earn some money for his family, and that there is no need to send him to prison.
This is why until the Council of Agriculture finishes drafting its regulations on raising wild animals, perhaps the wild animals in zoos, circuses, breeding stations and laboratories can only trust in providence. If their keepers are good to them that's fine, but if they have bad keepers it is just hard luck.
Love me, love my dog:
The Chinese have a saying that "Heaven cares for all living things," but if today being good to animals has to be made law one really doesn't know if this a happy advance or a sad reflection on mankind. Of course, the birth of concern for animal welfare shows that people are "fed and clothed well enough to think of honor," but this means that it is also part of a set of values which change with the times in response to changing circumstances. As Hsia Liang-chou says, many actions which today look like animal abuse are the result of poverty, and "before shouting about animal welfare one should first adopt an attitude of tolerance."
Some Westerners have loudly decried as inhumane the Chinese habit of hanging chickens and ducks upside down when transporting them through the streets. But when one thinks about it, if people had motor vehicles with which to transport the fowl then they would have no need to hang them upside down on the backs of bicycles. If humane killing equipment had not been invented, wouldn't people today still be using slaughtering knives as in days gone by?
It would appear that if one wants to ensure animal welfare, one must first look to the welfare of the people who will provide it.
But recently it has been "rumored" that some animals think that even so, this is still much better than humans simply being concerned to live their own lives in comfort, without sparing a thought for whether the other living creatures around them live or die.
[Picture Caption]
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What is the right way to look after an animal? Animal rights advocates in other countries believe strict regulations are required to reduce animal abuse. Our photo shows a dog with gastroenteritis on an intravenous drip.
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Does tugging at a buffalo's coat or grabbing its horn count as animal abuse ? Happily this game won't hurt the beast any more than "a mosquito biting a buffalo's horn." Otherwise, radical Western animal protectionists might protest. (photo by Hsieh Chi-kuang)
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For goats which once lived among jagged mountain crags, a block of wood can help to alleviate homesickness. To let animals live in surroundings like their original habitat, zoos are changing their way of working. Perhaps chains will one day be a thing of the past. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)
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Bare chicken? As if being reared for the stewpot wasn't bad enough, these chickens have been bred into a form their own ancestors surely wouldn't recognize. To save the work of plucking, poultry breeders have created these "untraditional" featherless fowl.
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Hi-fi for dogs? Isn't this going a bit far? What level of welfare animals can enjoy often depends on humans' standard of welfare. For a pet in a rich household, lying on a leather sofa in-stead of the floor is nothing unusual.
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For wild animals, there is no greater welfare than their freedom. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)