Stuffed Animals on Truck Grills

There's an article in the New York Times (found via Boing Boing) about why stuffed animals are found on the front of trucks and especially garbage trucks. It would be easy to explain this phenomenon away as just a trend, monkey see (monkey laugh) monkey do, but this is something that I have seen in Taiwan, too. I would guess that it was something that started here spontaneously, and was not imported from abroad, but it's hard to say. Here are a couple of quotes from the article.

…the grille-mounted stuffed animal is almost always a found object - "mongo," in garbageman's parlance. And in that respect it functions as a sort of trophy.
"Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck - there's a kind of macho thing about that," she said.