Existing Laws

“Respect for animal life so as to protect animals and improve animal welfare” is the motto of Taiwan’s Animal Protection Act. It is thereby to provide fundamental protection over animals by regulating human actions that involve interaction with animals. While the general purpose of such acts is usually similar, it still varies internationally. In Tawan, the Animal Protection Law is only limited to dogs, cats, and other animals kept or managed. Notably, the owner of pets needs to be 20 or more than 20 years old. If not, his or her legal representative or legal guardian will be considered the owner instead. To quickly understand Taiwan Protection Law in a generalized yet comprehensive way, we could review its five principles and standards listed respectively in Articles 5, 7, 11, 19, 20, and 21.

owners must provide pets with: food, water, mobile Environment, and medicl care regulation on access to public spaces
Owners shall not abandon
owners must prevent their own pet from infringing on the life safety, freedom, or property of others

Laws needed, including those in progress

As mentioned earlier, animals such as Invertebrates (such as octopus and squid), arthropods (such as insects, crabs, and shrimps), and echinoderms (such as starfish and sea urchins) are not covered by Taiwan’s Animal Protection Law. Obviously, as human damage went significantly beyond this scope, our law has not been kept up. Another issue can be seen in our daily life. Nowadays, many coffee shops or restaurants use pets as an attractive factor to incentivize customers to purchase goods, which does not violate the law at this point. Yet there are cases where animals are abused due to not matching the expectations of the store owner. For this reason, Taiwan needs to focus more on the interaction between animals and humans in certain terms for economic reasons. Moving on, although our law does protect animals' lives in laboratories yet in 107, the number of animals that died in laboratories was 3.16 million, with a death rate of 89%. Many of these purposes don’t even need to be tested with animals sacrificing their lives yet they still do for the inflexibility of scientific procedures. Education on this part is certainly needed as some students or even adults perceive those lives, often experimental mice, are created to serve only for experiments anyway. Taiwan Protection Law Act clearly has flaws and incompleteness but our progress is still worth noting. May it proceed successfully.