Category:

　　2. Community Groups and Special Populations

Description of Our Community

　　Taipei is the capital city of Taiwan.  Therefore, it has many business headquarters and important governmental institutions.  It is a city combined of original Taipei and New Taipei area. It has an approximate population of 7 million residents.  Taipei is the place we grew up of and therefore we love it deeply. We sincerely want it to be a better place, and we want to help reduce the amounts of strayed cats in Taipei.

Summary of Our Project

　　The goal of our project is to strengthen the idea of responsible ownership of cats.  We want to give people a contour about the general living situation of cats in Taipei.  We interview many cat lovers including cat keepers, vets, a bookstore owner, restaurant owners, volunteers and cat photographers. We also manufacture a cat map in Taipei area, and collect sufficient information about cat restaurants and cat clinics. We also provide basic knowledge about raising a cat, and most important of all, we want to remind people of thinking twice if he or she should keep a cat.  By knowing cats better, we couldn’t stress more about the fact that people must recognize that this is a matter of responsibility and be willing to take good care of cats for life.   We ask the participants their opinions and ideas about strayed cat problems.  We hope people understand that abandoning cats is cruel, merciless and will also do harm to our community.

What has been or will be the impact of your project on your community?

Doing the project helps us know basic facts about the cats and what we can do for them to make our community a better place.  Though we are just high school students, we can still use our web page to help people gain the related knowledge about cats’ lives in Taipei.   Practically, with our cats map, people can find useful information if they need to take their cats to the clinics in Taipei area, or they just want to go out dining with their cats!  We can also spread the concept that people should love their cats in the right way and never abandon them.  It is a right thing to do, not only for protecting animals, but also for reducing the amounts of strayed cats in Taipei.

Problems We had to Overcome

　　Most participants are very nice and willing to be interviewed.  The most difficult problem we had faced was that we didn’t have much time since we had plenty of homework and exams. It’s hard for all of us to gather together at the same time to do an interview, so we sorted the tasks and the teacher assigned each one of us different job.  After discussing with our teacher, we also solved many technical problems when we were making the web page. Everything went better once we figured out how everything should go step by step and how we could cooperate.

Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises

 Before working on the Cyberfair project, most of us didn’t know much about cats. In fact, we are seldom aware of the things around us.  However, the more we try to understand cats, the more we feel amazed.  We might think we knew what cats are, but actually we know neither about their habits nor their favors.   Through this research, we found out that cats love to keep clean and like to sleep.  Cats are sleeping most of the time in a day.  To our amazement, those cats which run away from people will rub against our feet and even jump onto us.  Everything is so fresh and amazing to us after we started to know more about them!  We started to like to do a project as a team, and we are more than willing to explore another subject right around us!