January 25, 2012
Yesterday, Amsterdam Artis Zoo elephant Win Thida (not this one, but one like it) became the first ever elephant in Europe to be given a contact lens, in her case, for her left eye. The 44-year-old Asian elephant had a damaged cornea and had problems keeping her eye open because of the pain.
She probably injured her eye with a branch while playing with other elephants.
(Link: www.telegraaf.nl, Photo of Asian elephant by cskk, some rights reserved)
November 23, 2011
A family in Edam (yes, where the cheese comes from) and a couple in Heerhugowaard have recently escaped death by carbon monoxide poisoning, according to Radio + TV Noord Holland who can sometimes be hard up for hard news.
Last week, the family in Edam was woken up in the middle of the night by their little boy who wanted to pee and in waking up the parents, he also saved them from dying, although the story offers little detail. They assume their house needs to be renovated, while the housing corporation denies it, but will check it out.
The couple in Heerhugowaard had noticed that their cat was acting very weird when in fact he was presenting with the early symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Thanks to the cat acting as a carbon monoxide detector, they discovered a straight leak of gas into their house from the upstairs neighbours, and in turn saved a few neighbours from death.
(My old cat Pussyminou couldn’t monitor anything but her own sleep)
(Links: rtvnh.nl, www.rtvnh.nl)
Tags: carbon monoxide, Edam, Heerhugowaard, poisoning
November 16, 2011
We’ve written a lot of croquette stories on this blog, made from meat leftovers, questionable vegetarian variants and about general croquette awareness.
A goose meat croquette sounds to me like a Dutch Christmas appetizer or even a fancy French one. However, the geese in question are some of 100.000 geese a year that are shot to stop planes at Schiphol getting geese in their engines.
Beach side café Beach Inn in IJmuiden, North Holland is serving goose meat croquettes made from the geese shot down at Schiphol airport. As I also saw recently on telly, a goose hunter for the airport said catching and releasing would mean hiring an army (they fly back to the airport anyways, a waste of time) and poisoning their eggs is just not done anymore and doesn’t really help.
The geese are usually destroyed or sometimes end up in cat food. Rob Hagenouw, an artist from Amsterdam, contacted some hunters, score some goose and worked hard at creating his own recipe. He says that with his croquettes, the flavours really come out.
Eating goose, or turkey for that matter, is not really a Christmas thing in the Netherlands for many reasons. First, many people do not have ovens due to a lack of living space. They have combination microwave and and oven devices that barely fit a decent sized pizza. Second, even if you do have an oven like I do, a goose or turkey won’t fit. Guineafowl or chicken is the best you can hope for. Another reason is that it’s just not a Dutch tradition to shove a big bird in the oven.
(Link: www.telegraaf.nl)
November 15, 2011
The Dutch emergency number is 112, but thanks to a political party that has more in common with animals than people who don’t look Dutch, they’ve set up the emergency number 114 144, opening today, to report animal-related accidents, abuse and neglect. Calling 114 144 will send specially trained cops over to that puppy farm that sells cute puppies illegally ‘imported’ from Albania and what have you.
If you read the information from 114 Red een dier (114 Save an animal), the site tells you to dial 144, which has to be a mistake is confusing to say the least.
Of course, it sounds like a great idea, just like training ‘animal cops’ to catch people who mistreat animals and hand down tougher sentences against people who abuse animals. It remains ironic that although the current government promised 3,000 additional regular cops on the streets to handle crime, it welched on that and managed to scrounge up 500 animal cops to appease their ‘silent’ coalition partner, the one that likes furry animals and dislikes humans of the non-Dutch persuasion.
Just remember, a few years ago the Dutch finally outlawed sex with animals, but before that was a top distributor of animal porn worldwide.
Some animals are more equal than others. Just like people.
UPDATE: According to newspaper De Volkskrant, the animal emergency number is 144, but it used to be 114. Nobody knows why and the government hasn’t provided an answer yet. What a mess.
MORE UPDATE: According to nu.nl news site, it was controversial member of Parliament Dion Graus, also of the not so non Dutch friendly political party who personally reserved the domain name ‘114redeendier.nl’. He was planning to push his animal friendly ideas through for a long time, and his day came. The irony of him having been accused of beating his ex wife and making threats against his ex stepfather (justice dropped it for lack of evidence), but wanting to defend animals makes him quite the colourful politician.
(Link: www.rnw.nl)
Tags: animal cops, police
October 27, 2011
Amsterdam and surely many other Dutch cities have lots of rats, what with these damp, age-old canals and all. And no, not the cute little grey mice that could adorn some Anton Pieck painting, but the bigguns that a posh neighbourhood like Amsterdam South is not expected to have running around.
According to newspaper De Telegraaf, the Marie Heinekenplein is “swarming” with them. The square has many outdoor cafés as well as a supermarket where a woman claimed to have seen about 30 of them in one go. As usual, businesses and locals have complained about the situation, but are being ignored by the city. Although everyone is responsible for making sure there’s no food left around, the city apparently does not pick up the trash often enough, which doesn’t help. Amsterdam’s innercity garbage collection is mostly done by stacking it someone twice and week as if it were the suburbs, which is not something other big European cities do.
And poisoning them is an option, but apparently about 39% of these rats can take it. “Research done by Wageningen University shows a large number of rats in the Netherlands have a genetic make-up which allows them to develop resistance more quickly.”
(Links: telegraaf.nl, www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Brown rat by Jean-Jacques Boujot, some rights reserved)
Tags: Amsterdam, poison, rats, Wageningen University
September 22, 2011
The effects of the vegetarian pseudo-scientific smear campaign against meat eaters keep spreading like an oil spill. Professor Roos Vonk (pronounced Rose Vonk) from the Radboud University in Nijmegen seemed to be little more than a victim of her Tilburg colleague Diederik Stapel at first, but when it turned out that she herself is a vegetarian (most of the time) people started wondering if perhaps her own research was skewed by her preferences.
Vonk denied this, although later she bravely admitted that it was justified for people to harbour suspicions. Vonk’s alma mater’s academic integrity committee has since started looking into her possible involvement.
And now the university is making itself look bad by censoring its own internal weekly magazine, the ‘competing’ student-run magazine ANS reports. The weekly, called Vox, was not allowed to publish a column that mused about how the academic community could learn from the mistakes that were made. Spokes person Willem Hooglugt told ANP last Tuesday that “we maintain radio silence, both internally and externally. This is a conscious choice. When we allow dissent [sorry, my bad—ed.] discussion, objectivity could suffer, and we wish to avoid that.”
This excuse would not emanate the stench of a blatant cover up if Vox did not proudly proclaim on its website’s front page that it is independent, and that its independence is anchored by both an editorial charter and an editorial council (see illustration). Needs more cowbell, that page.
Disclaimer: I myself studied at Radboud University back when it was still the Roman-Catholic University of Nijmegen, and wrote for ANS. The university often came across as deeply conservative, parochial, and surprisingly distasteful of students. (Example of the latter: the dining hall was regularly checked for people that should not be there, i.e. people who were neither student nor university employee. Somehow the security personnel only checked people that looked like students, even though the place was rife with families with children, pensioners and truckers.)
(Screenshot: Vox)
September 21, 2011
A German family of two parents in their thirties and four children (11, 5, 4 and 3 months) is said to be hiding in the woods near Sibculo, Overijssel, just a few kilometres from the German border. They are hiding from the German authorities, as the court ruled that the kids had to be taken away from their parents for reasons the press doesn’t mention. They also own three dogs. The family is originally from Warendorf, East of Münster, much further away, but in a relative beeline from where they are now.
They have been moving around by bike with a trailer hitched to it since September, and the Germans want the Dutch to help them find the family, as they are worried about the children’s well-being. I still would like to know why.
If we can find terrorists, we can find a big family that can’t run, with kids and a baby, and three possibly barking dogs, right? OK, they are pretty cool travelling by bike.
(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl)
Tags: children, Germans, Overijssel
September 1, 2011
There can be quite some dog pooh on the street in the Netherlands sometimes because the owners pay taxes and some interpret that as ‘my dog can go anywhere it wants without me having to pick it up because I pay for it.’ It could be worse, but it could always be better.
The town of Wijchen, Gelderland is considering getting some device that reads pooh DNA, finds the dog that matches it, which in turn leads to the owner getting a fine. It’s all very CSI. Would people and law makers actually allow the reading of dog pooh DNA as a basis for a fine? And then the town has to properly keep a DNA database of all the dogs. Experience teaches us that government and databases are a very bad match in general.
The bottom line is, it’s also really expensive, the boffins say.
(Link: www.gelderlander.nl.nl, Photo of Pick Up Your Dog Poo by Michael Coghlan, some rights reserved)
August 29, 2011
Last Wednesday the Barneveld police arrested a thief after the parrot he had stolen responded to its owner’s call.
The African Grey was one of 70 birds that had been stolen from a nearby location. The owner had received a tip that two of his birds had been spotted at the animal market of Barneveld. When he called the bird’s name, it came to him. The police then verified the owner’s claim by checking the ring numbers. A second bird from the theft was also retrieved.
Two other birds were discovered in the home of the thief, a 30-year-old man from Hilversum.
(Photo of an unrelated African Grey parrot by Wikipedia user Jonathan G Wang who released it into the public domain)
Tags: African Grey Parrot, Barneveld, crime, parrots
August 26, 2011
It is really difficult to determine whether a cat is really that old except to trust their owners to tell the truth. When we wrote ‘Oldest’ cat of the Netherlands dies, we put quotes around ‘oldest’ because it really is hearsay. And ‘our’ cat story had a 29-year-old cat. And we wrote about it because on the same day, my cat died at age 21.
Of course, when you’re a tabloid and the news is dominated by non-Dutch things and rainy weather, a cute cat story in a pinch will do (our story comes from the same paper). The article says the oldest living cat is 21, which means my cat and the two above made the record. It all sounds too easy to me.
The thing I want to heckle is the uneducated stupid attempt to calculate the cat’s age in human years, which is preposterous at best.
A 3-month-old cat is a kitten, a two-year-old cat is an adult, a 10-year-old cat is a senior. The development of a cat is not comparable to that of a human. If you want to try and come close to the animal’s human age with an adult cat, add four years to their cat age and multiply the outcome by four. I grabbed this calculation in a Dutch book called ‘Encyclopedie van misvattingen’ (The Encyclopedia of Misconceptions), which I highly recommend if you spread repeated nonsense about cuckcoo clocks being made in Switerzland (instead of Germany) and Inuits have, I dunno, 53 words for snow.
That crap of multiplying animals’ years by seven is for stupid journalists who repeat things like parrots do.
(The cat in the pic is our deceased Moonster.)
(Link: ad.nl)
Tags: cats, misconceptions
