Stand(ing) for Wolves in Taiwan

This is a guest post by Sunny Chang of Tapei City, Taiwan (R.O.C.). She learned of the proposal to remove Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves and organized an event in Tapei City. Thanks Sunny!

By Sunny Chang

I was sad when I heard that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service planned to delist the gray wolf across much of the lower-48 states. Wolves were the top predator in the ecosystem. They played an important role in Nature. Let’s look back to see the case of “repatriated wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996”. Obviously, wolves effected many other kinds of animals. They kept ecosystem balance. The leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, Douglas W. Smith (*2004) also said: “Wolves are to Yellowstone what water is to the Everglades.” Delisting wolves will result in severe slaying. They still need our help.

Wolf is my favorite animal. And since I love painting, drawing this beautiful creature is one of my favorite hobbies. There is a friend of mine, who also loves wolf just like I do. Therefore, my classmate and I planned to stand for wolves in Taiwan (R.O.C.). One action of standing for wolves is to collect people’s sign for wolves, which aims at anti-wolves-delisting. In order to recruit more people to take part in the stand-for-wolves activity, we stand in front of Taipei Zoo to ask people to sign. As a return, we drew many wolf cards and gave them to those who were willing to sign. We also made our own poster and wolf ears to draw people’s attention. At the end of that day, we were excited to find out that more than 50 signs were collected.

On August 14, 2013, we started our event at 10:00 A.M. At first, there were many people passed without paying attention. But we still called people for protect wolves. We showed our handmade cards and poster to people. Luckily, some people noticed our poster. So we explained about our event to them. I also told them that if they sign for wolf, they will have our handmade animal card. Our event ended at 12:00 A.M. In total, fifty-four signs were collected!

Before the event, it took us one week to prepare. During that week, we did our best to prepare everything required for the event, such as drawing wolf cards, translating the Wolf Petition from English to Chinese and creating our poster for wolves. I was glad to organize this event in Taiwan to stand for wolves. Standing for wolves is very meaningful to me! May wolf have a bright future!

*Jim Robbins (2004).〈Lessons from the WOLF〉.《Scientific American: June 2004》.