A long time ago I already wrote an entry about the spread of exotic animals, including black widows, in my country, but last week I saw a delightful report on German TV about a black widow pest in the Antwerp area in Belgium. The pest is apparently caused by the fact that an exceptionally high number of classic cars has been imported from the United States thru the port of Antwerp. These cars have been sitting untouched at garages for, in some cases, decades at a time, and so these cars have become very attractive habitats for spiders. A brown recluse wouldn't survive in our climate, but black widows appear to be very resilient.
I wasn't surprised that a thing like this would occur in Belgium. In my experience, if Belgians discover American culture they really, really go for it. I know of four cases where people dress up like native Americans and sleep in teepees as much as they can. This includes a former penfriend of mine. On my first trip to the US I also met a Belgian couple clad in full cowboy gear looking for linedance parties in every town where we stayed overnight. I won't give you a full list of cases I came across, because it's simply too much work.
Anyways, if I ever buy a classic car, I'll choose a European alternative. It just may take a few more decades before I can buy that Bugatti.
Something I never realized until earlier this week. When you find a wounded owl in your Dutch backyard, you can't take it to the vet straight away. It's a protected animal. You have to take it to the police first, so they can check whether or not you're guilty of its wounds. Only after that you are free to get it the veterinary attention it needs. The owl could have died during this bureaucratic diversion...
The Dutch police have to cope without their dogs for the next few months, maybe years. Apparently the use of police dogs in solving murders is an unreliable method. This isn't the fault of the dogs themselves however. It's the cops themselves who are to blame. Sniffer dogs are used mainly to prove suspects have been present at the crime scene at some point and have held the suspected murder weapon in their hands. The police are impatient however, so if a suspect looks innocent, the cops will manipulate the evidence so, that the dog will bark at the right time to get innocent suspects convicted. It's sad to see the many ways in which animals are misused by humans. All this has no bearing on sniffer dogs that look for drugs and explosives at the airports.
Next Tuesday evening there will be a rare city meeting in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. A dog will be given the opportunity to express its concerns about the city's dog-related policies. Its master, Theo Beenen, who is a city council member, has requested time for Djero to speak, and since there was no law against it, Djero is on for Tuesday. As long as it doesn't disturb the peace it will all be down to the dog whether anything meaningful will be said. Mr. Beenen is very realistic about his dogs ambition, however. More than a simple, yet heartfelt 'Woof' is not to be expected. 'Djero is a dog of few words.'
Good news for all you feminists out there: your Spanish counterparts are fighting for the right to run with cows in Pamplona. I'm sure you know about this annual event where people are chased thru the streets of Pamplona by bulls, who later that day will meet their painful deaths. Well, feminist students in Spain demand that a similar event be held for women, chased by cows. Now, I don't think feminism is a laughing matter. I think that all man and women need to share equal rights, and be payed equally according to work done, but wheneve an initiative is undertaken, it's helpful to set a goal. I don't really understand how focusing on running with cows is helping anyone. Besides, women are already allowed to participate in the bull run, and that to me seems more like equality to me, than letting women run with cows. This to me sounds like women finally allowed to play baseball, demanding to play softball instead.
I'm wondering, do you know this problem in America? The summer vacation has kicked off this past weekend, and all over Western Europe people get several weeks of paid vacation (3 in the Netherlands), and they are using it to take the family for a beach vacation in Southern Europe.
And then, suddenly, just weeks before they leave, they suddenly realize that they hadn't thought about making arrangements for cat, dog, etc., and they're certainly not planning to take their precious pet along on the drive. We do have shelters that offer vacation arrangements or pets, but not everyone wishes to pay, or the animals haven't had the required shots, or whatever...
So, what do they do? They try to sell their pets on eBay, or similar sites, like marktplaats.nl. As soon as the summer vacation draws near, the number of pets up for auction just explodes all over North Western Europe. If you think that is loathsome, wait till you hear what people do when they don't manage to offload their dog in time. There are people who take the dog with them, and as soon as they drive through wooded areas they pull over and tie the dogs to trees by their leashes. The police are very active in fighting this crime, but they can't be everywhere.
In America you don't have paid vacation, right? Yet, do you know of this problem over there?
Another animal-related entry. We, Belgium and the Netherlands have a situation on our hands, that has scientist baffled. Two days ago, there suddenly were 80+ sightings of vultures, where all the sightings to date accumulated only numbered 50 in total. These vultures normally live in the Pyrenees on the Franco-Spanish border, but for some reason they have moved northward.
There are two theories about this. The first one has to do with mad cow disease. The EU have forbidden farmers to leave animal carcasses lying around on their land. If they wish to dump these carcasses on official dumpsites they have to pay, so they rather have the carcasses incinerated. This leaves vultures without food.
The second theory is that this is just a bunch of young vultures looking for some adventure outside their normal living habitat, and that they will fly back to where they came from any day now.
Hoping to strengthen the vultures for their journey home, Belgian authorities have dumped pig carcasses on a field outside Brussels, but the vultures never touched down to eat from it, and the carcasses have been removed. Belgian animal rights activists have responded in anger, because now they believe that people all over Belgium will try to attract vultures for photos or whatever by leaving meat in their own backyards.
Some Belgian media even went so far as to say that these vultures can potentially fly off with small children and cats, leaving the authorities desperately trying to tell the public that vultures can tell the difference between dead meat and live children and pets.
This message struck me as funny. Apparently a cat in France walked 500 miles to its new (not his old) home in a matter of months. Mimine disappeared a day before its family moved east 500 miles, so they decided to go ahead and move without it. Then last week, I think, Mimine showed up on their doorstep. I don't really believe the cat found them on its own. The cat must have returned to its house when it got hungry, and after awhile the new owners must have grown tired of taking care of someone else's cat. Someone in the neighborhood must have known the address of the people Mimine belonged to, and on their way to their spring vacation destination they must have dropped off the cat. I bet they now run a risk of losing Mimine again, because it wants to walk home.
In other cat news, another cat is trying to take over from our cat. Some ugly fleabag, probably the result of mistreatment, sneaks in to eat my cat's food, it tries to chase away my cat from the backyard, etc. Fortunately there's usually someone around to make sure this cat isn't getting too cocky, but we do have places to go and things to do. Obviously, the cat does look like it's been mistreated, so we would take it to the vet, but it doesn't let itself be approached by any creature bigger than itself.
A weird thing is going on in the Noorderdierenpark Zoo in Emmen in the Northeastern Netherlands. The baboons are completely freaked out. It started a week ago or so. Anything that happens, sounds they hear, their image reflected in the water surface, etc., sends them in a state of utter panic. They have been piling together on top of their rock since it started and since venturing out on their own isn't part of the instincts of baboons there is no telling when they will start behaving normally again.
Some people now fear that there is a natural catastrophe on its way, as animals perceive the signs much sooner than us, but Drenthe is not a region where such disasters would normally happen. There'll be an earthquake rating 3.0 on the Richter scale at the very worst, but that's nothing serious. And since the apes have been behaving like this for a week now, the likelihood of an earthquake is vanishing. Animals will perceive it second or minutes sooner than our seismographs pick it up. Certainly not a week.
In light of SilverWind's entry about polar bears, I have some polar bear news of my own, which appals me. There is this polar bear cub in the zoo of Berlin Germany, by the name of Knut. Knut recently made it's first appearence before the public, but it was the center of controversy in the weeks before. German animal protection activists wanted the authorities to put Knut down. They argued that a cub will never grow to become a real polar bear in captivity. They may have a point, but that is no excuse for taking a life. Plus, if things continue the way they are polar bears will become extinct well before the turn of the century, and people calling themselves animal rights activists should feel ashamed trying to speed up this process. Their pleas have been largely ignored however, and have only backfired on the activists themselves. The German public are outraged at them.
A new installment in the category 'going ape'! I've decided to stick with it, as there is always something going on in the animal kingdom. I'll use this to bail myself out, whenever I'm in one of those inspirationless spells when I'm just staring at the screen in front of me. Doesn't happen to often, but we all know this situation, don't we?
The most prominent news comes from the sea this time. We've had a storm about three weeks ago, in which lots of seal pups became isolated from their mothers. Over a hundred of them have washed ashore on our coast. Fortunately we have a seal shelter just for such events, at Pieterburen in the far north. It is run by a woman named Leny 't Hart, who is a cousin of the woman who used to run the cafeteria at my highschool. Many of these seal pups, especially the most recent ones to be found, are close to starvation, but the seal shelter will rescue them, I expect. If you're wondering what the poor creatures are being fed, that's actually pretty simple: shredded herring in water. If only all things in life...
A news item some of you may actually have seen on the news, was the one about the horses. There was another storm a couple of months ago, and as the authorities saw it coming they asked all farmers with animals grazing in risky areas to get their livestock to safety. One bunch of horses thought differently, though, and trotted right back into the danger zone, and were thus stranded on a tiny postage stamp of land, cut off from the mainland by the sea. Rescue attempts made in the days following the storm made the news in countries all over the world, including several cities in the US.
This is an entry inspired by something that happened last Friday: my cat, a tabby tomcat named Molly (don't look at me, the name wasn't my idea), caught himself a bat. That was pretty interesting. I knew there were bats in Enkhuizen, but actually seeing one? That was a first. It wasn't actually the first time I saw a bat. Back when I lived in Hoorn and played soccer every summer evening, I saw loads of them flying overhead, usually just after nightfall. Plus, I've been to Disney's Animal Kingdom over in Orlando, where they have a collection of bats a lot larger than the ones we have over here. Yet, too see one upclose like the one my cat caught, that was sort of special. Even though I knew they were there, bats were almost like a mythical species, because they are so rarely seen.
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That brings me to squirrels. Throughout my early school years, until sixth grade or so, squirrels were a regular feature in schoolbooks and stories the teachers would tell. It was almost as if they were an everyday occurence in Dutch nature. And so, I've looked for them and looked for them, but I've never found one. Sure enough, when I was in America, I saw them just about everywhere, from the streets of Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., to the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains, but until last April I had never seen proof that they even existed in Europe. Until... I saw a Champions League semifinals soccer game I normally wouldn't even have watched, because the teams didn't appeal to me. In the fifteenth minute, I believe, there was suddenly a squirrel on the field, in London, and it took the players several minutes to chase it away. The funniest moments I've ever seen in a CL game at that. I don't have great faith in European nature, but this brought hope to my heart.
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In other animal news three foreign species have made it to the list of domestic species in the Netherlands this year: the rat snake, the black widow, and the redback spider. The proliferation of the non-venimous rat snake started ten years ago, when the owner of three rat snakes grew bored and released them in his backyard. Just south of Groningen they have become an everyday sight. The black widow and the redback spider have benefited from airline traffic and are thriving throughout Europe. Don't worry, there have been no fatalities yet. I do worry a little about the Australian redback spider, which is said to lurk in toilet bowls, but other than that, they bring a hazardous edge to the Dutch environment, and I find that exciting to say the least.
No, I haven't returned to MySpace. This acquaintance goes back eleven years.
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* Soraya
