How do you hire your staff and workers?

It’s hard, this is not a really popular job, and because number one, we are quite far away from Taipei, and a lot of people don't want to come all the way to Sanzhi to work, they don't wanna live here. And another thing is this job...you’re out here a lot, which is very nice in the summer because it is warm, and the sun is shining, but in the middle of winter when it's raining, and everything is cold and wet, then maybe it's not so nice. So people don't like that, and I think here in Taiwan, I think maybe like it's dirty work. You know? You'll get very dirty working in here, and it's a long day and sometimes you'll have to lift heavy things, and touch raw chicken, and sometimes you have to clean, pick up poop or something, so a lot of people just don't like this work. Some people still do, I love this, I grew up in a farm, so I'm used to all these things. But the people who do come here, they are always hard workers, they love animals, you know? It's very easy to say you love an animal, but it's less easy to actually do something to help, you know? And so we advertise in the newspaper, if anybody hears someone who's looking for a job, we tell them to come up. So then we do an interview, then the person will come and try the work for a day or two, if we like him and they like the job, then we'll invite him back for a few weeks and then we see...if they stay or not. It takes about two month of working here before you are fully trained. And that means we can just trust you, to be anywhere, and the dogs will be fine and you will fine, and then you can take care of any situation. Umm, so...that's all, thank you! No problem at all.

What are some of your objectives?

Some of our objectives for 2018 are well, for me, and for dog kingdom, I want to build better facilities for our old dogs and for our disabled dogs. We have some dogs who are completely disabled from the waist down, so they can’t walk, or some of them can’t go to the bathroom by themselves. And right now, they live in a room, and they do the best we can, but we’d really like to have a nice place for them where can get exercise, they can go outside. Other 2 big things we want to do: we want to have a stronger relationship with other animal organizations here in Taiwan, because we know if we all work together we can a lot more done. We also want to meet more people like you (our team) and talk about dogs and educate people to learn how to look after dogs better, how to learn the problems, the dangers of using traps, and things like that. Another big thing we would like to do is start to do TNR. TNR stands for trap, neuter, release. So we catch the dog, we neuter him so he can’t have more babies, then we wait until he’s better and we let him go again. That means that if a dog is having a happy life living on the mountains or something, he can still have that life, but at least he’s not having babies and making the problem bigger.

Do you believe that TNVR will be able to control stray animals effectively?

I think it is probably the best system that is available right now. Is it perfect? No. The perfect way would be to take all the dogs and find them wonderful homes, or build lovely houses for them everywhere. But, I don’t know of anything else we could do. I think it’s going to take time, but I think that it can be effective. I think another thing that people need to do is that dogs all need to be microchipped. That means that if somebody does dump their dog or throw it away, we can find it, we can check it, and we can find the owner. And then what we have to do is we have to push the government to make people obey the laws, so say you can’t dump a dog, you can’t be cruel to a dog. So I think TNR is a big part of the other things we need to do.

If the cat has been adopted will the cat villa still help or track them?

Of course yes. Some people didn’t have a cat before. Now phones and chatting apps are developed, they would ask us questions on Facebook or Line, and they would post more new pictures about their cats.

Are the cats that have been adopted still good? Or did they run away or get hurt after they were adopted?

If we already have some things or tools to prevent them from escaping, it would happen less times, but it does not mean it would never happen. One time a person who delivered the gas opened my door, no one noticed that my cat ran away. After that, I think I didn’t see my cat for 30 minutes. Maybe it ran out when the door was opened by the man who delivered the gas. So I searched the entire building, and I found it hiding in someone’s shoe cabinet, it didn’t move but its tail stuck out a little bit. The cat was very scared so it hid in the shoe cabinet. We can only try to prevent out cats from running away, but we can never guarantee that they will not try to escape.

What are some ways that we can help stray animals?

There’s a lot of ways. And another one very simple thing you can do is be nice to animals! I know maybe that sounds really easy, but if you see somebody mistreating an animal maybe tell them to stop, you know? A lot of people I know that live around here, sometimes they feed the stray dogs, which is really good...If you know an area that has a lot of stray dogs, and there’s no dangerous ones, you can organize to leave food for them, maybe at a certain time every night. You can also help dogs by doing TNR, or animals in general.