The Public Health course this semester arranged a visit to let us know more about that field. The visit including broiler logistics and sales corporative, meat marketing and Animal Conversation Education Park in Taoyuan City.

The first stop was Broiler logistics and sales corporative, the sequence of the visit of the operating line formed cleaning line to dirty line, some classification line, chilling chamber, veterinary inspection (remove the problematic internal organs), iron hair and waste disposal.

What impressed me was the steps of the veterinarian to check the internal organs. It is because the speed of the conveyor which hanging the chicken is quite fast, the veterinarian needs to check one in an average of every 2 seconds or so, so they must have enough experience to keep up with speed.

The second stop was the meat market, the sequence of visits was slaughter line, sewage disposal and the auction house. One of the interesting things for me was the auction house. The pig will walk out one by one, weighing and stamp the ID number. There is a button next to the buyer’s seat for subscribing. If the pig doesn’t sell after a certain time, it will go back. If the buyer wins the bid, they can choose slaughtered at the slaughterhouse inside there or transported to other slaughterhouses.

The last stop was the Animal Conversation Education Park in Taoyuan City. First, the veterinarian who worked in the park introduced the goal and operation of the park and something related to a stray animal to us, then we started to visit the park. The sequence of the visit was a clinic, kennel and cattery. Since the park has been reconstructed, and the number of animals housed is still small, so the environment is clean and comfortable. Also, it builds a range that allows dogs to move freely, which fully concern animal welfare.

— Chau Sin Lee

This month I attended a field trip held by our public health course. I went to a chicken processing plant, a pig processing plant and an animal shelter. The experience is mind-blowing. The chicken processing plant is very hot, outdated and relatively dirty in the first half of the plant where chickens are killed and cleaned, whereas the other half of the plant is very modernized and organized. At the cleaner part of the plant, the chickens are cut into required portions, sorted, packed and stored for transport to the suppliers. I was told that the chicken pieces are first cleaned with diluted chloral, which is surprising.

In the pig plant, I saw that the pigs live in a very crowded place where they can’t even walk or stand up properly. I was sad since I thought they are living in places where they have enough space to walk around like those shown in news. Because of that, I decided to avoid eating pork and I started to know why people will be vegan.

In the animal shelter, the staff gave us a talk about the zero euthanasia policy in Taiwan and its current condition. The zero euthanasia policy is that animal shelters will not put stray dogs and cats down unless they are severely injured or in serious illness. The struggle of this policy is that stray dogs and cats increase in number indefinitely since the rate of adoption is much slower than that of dogs and cats being thrown away. However, their living space is limited since buildings cannot be built indefinitely to accommodate them. I think that the trip is educational and profound.

— Yeu Ernest

I am not sure whether it is due to my own psychological effect or an enormous increase in study burden, I always feel that time passes more quickly than last year, and suddenly the season of final exams has already come. Sometimes, I think that I in the last year was really blessed and naive. A year ago, the only demanding subject was anatomy, while I thought my study pressure had been high enough already! Don’t you think I was really naive at that time? To be honest, there are way more core subjects for me to take this semester, while most of the subjects are quite challenging! Hence, the study workload this year is a lot larger than before. What’s more, histology and biochemistry are so demanding to me, not only because I find them hard to understand what professors taught in the lecture, their textbooks are also difficult to be comprehended thoroughly. Sometimes I could get really helpless and depressed.

However, I know that all the complaints could help nothing, and could by no way stop the finals from coming, but I believe that as long as I don’t give up and be more hard-working, I would catch up with the study as a result. Let’s fight for our finals together!

— Lau Wun Lam