The woman I am in contact with is Taiwanese. Her name is Faustina. She is an architect and has worked in New York City for the past many years. She moved back to Taiwan to work 3 years ago, as her family is all there. Though not even what she calls an "animal person", on her return she was emotionally assaulted by the horror that she saw in the treatment of, in particular, dogs. It is unthinkable what happens to dogs there. There are no governmental regulations re animal care/cruelty, so all of the rescue groups are grass-roots and are funded with their own money.

Faustina has adopted one dog over here. BanBan's (dog's name) has been adopted by a couple on the island where I live (Galiano). Faustina is helping one of these grassroots groups in Taiwan by finding dogs home outside of Taiwan. She takes care of everything to get the dogs over here, including flying them over. She's quite amazing.

Fautina left me with some documentation of what goes on daily in Taiwan. Even with all my years in animal rescue, I have never seen anything like this.

I will be writing to some international animal groups to try to get some kind of attention on Taiwan. I know there was an attempted boycott of Taiwanese goods in Germany some years back. A German journalist was in Taiwan doing unrelated research, but his attention was diverted by what he saw. He did a story on the dogs instead and at home in Germany, people were horrified.

It is a complicated issue because many in Taiwan are Buddhist. The careworkers at some of the rescue centres (as paltry as these centres are) do not believe in euthanasia. At this moment, one centre has 10 dogs who are completely paralyzed due to broken backs (human induced). They feed them and love them, but.........

What a world we live in.

The file that I sent AAS with the 2 month old puppy with the broken legs --- he was hit and run by a truck. A pedestrian took him to a vet. The vet took care of him, but once he is healed, he will be sent to a public shelter. At the public shelters, dogs are kept for 7 days, and, if not adopted (or bought for meat under the table) within that 7 days, they are killed. By clubbing and drowning.

He will not be going to a rescue shelter, because he is not technically seen as 'rescue'.

Sandy