March 28, 2019

Dutchman wins Belgian seagull scream champs

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:23 pm

Black-backed

In the Belgian town of Adinkerke, a Flemish village close to the French border, 30 men and women did their best to imitate the scream of a seagull at a European Seagull Screaming Championship. We say men and women because there were two winners, one for the men and one for the women: a Belgian woman from Hasselt won her gold and the gold for the men’s was won by a Dutchman from Limburg.

Last year, 31 people participated in the Belgian Championship, and this year, it was time for a European version. The jury said that the level was ‘quite high’ and that part of the goal was to show appreciation for the seagull. I have friends on social media who cannot get enough of posting stories about seagull ripping food like fries out of people’s hand, but to each their own.

Our Limburger winner explains that he gives sport lessons outdoors and hears seagulls a lot, and was always impressed by the sound they make. He heard about the championship through friends and thought it would be fun to join in. “It was totally worth the 2.5 hour drive”, he added.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of Great black-backed gull by Robert Eliassen, some rights reserved)

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March 27, 2019

Dog tax: free to over a hundred euros in some places

Filed under: Animals,Comics by Orangemaster @ 2:42 pm

I first heard about a dog tax in a French comic book as a child. A family was playing a record on a turntable of the Skater’s Waltz by Frenchman Émile Waldteufel, sung by dogs, according to the drawings, of course. The family had earlier claimed they did not have a dog and at some point, the dog tax collector came back and gave them a fine for having a lot of dogs after hearing the record through the front door.

Like many things in the Netherlands that make little sense, municipalities often charge very different fees for things that shouldn’t be that different from one place to the next. A quick look at Noord-Brabant has Tilburg (107,86 euro) and Breda (104,55 euro) as the most expensive, followed by Veldhoven (84,18 euro), Den Bosch (83,64 euro) and Eindhoven (77,00 euro).

Municipalities that charge over 100 euro include The Hague and a few other places close to it that border the coast, Groningen way up north, Nijmegen next to Germany. Dog owners in 57 per cent of all municipalities still pay dog tax. One reason for a large amount of municipalities not to charge dog tax is that they need to have collectors and that’s expensive and not always very efficient.

Not only is dog tax apparently the oldest type of tax in the Netherlands, it’s also rarely used for cleaning up dog poop.

For anybody who cares about the situation in Noord-Brabant, feel free to sign a petition in order to get rid of dog tax.

Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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March 21, 2019

Dutch family caught with 3300 kilos of coke

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 3:38 pm

A Dutch father and his two sons living in Spain and Germany were caught by the police with a staggering 3300 kilos of cocaine back in 2017. They gave themselves up and are now in prison in the Netherlands, and I guess now the press can talk about it.

The cocaine, which was found in Hazeldonk near Breda, Noord Brabant, known as an important corridor between the Netherlands and Belgium, was hidden in a shipment of bananas from South America that was to be transported from Antwerp to the Netherlands.

Back in 2017, the owners of the transport company and the driver were arrested and a police team starting investigating to find out who was behind the smuggle. They did as you do and followed the money, and found villas, cash and expensive cars.

And because of a rough news week in the Netherlands with a terrible shooting and a racist party getting more leverage in the Dutch senate after yesterday’s elections, here’s a short video of a goat riding a sheep that I know I needed to watch.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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February 19, 2019

Gym refuses man with service dog: he’s not blind

Filed under: Animals,General,Health by Orangemaster @ 2:15 pm

A gym in Wormeveer, North Holland has refused entry to a client with PTSD and his service dog simply because the man is not blind. The gym client is a former local neighbourhood agent that suffers from PTSD as a result of having dealt with many life-threatening situations, including trying and sadly failing to save children from a burning house.

His PTSD meant the end of his career, but going to the gym should not be a stressful situation. The dog is welcome everywhere else he goes, and yes, he has filed a complaint of discrimination. Before it went that far, the man and the gym owner discussed the situation, but the owner wouldn’t budge.

Service dogs are sometimes denied entry to businesses by mistake, simply because business owners don’t know the law. However, if someone has a service dog, it’s usually for a damn good reason, and they don’t have to be blind to get one. The dog is trained much in the same way and it taught to stay calm, so the only issue is the owner’s reluctance.

And this, folks, is how you lose clients.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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January 21, 2019

Whale in Utrecht made from ocean plastic

Filed under: Animals,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 1:43 pm

The whale shown above was made from old plastic and is called ‘Skyscraper (The Bruges Whale)’, named after the summer art and architecture festival at which it was exhibited last summer in Bruges, Belgium. A professor from Utrecht University liked the whale so much, she was committed to getting it installed in Utrecht, and it was recently unveiled. It can be found in the Catharijnesingel.

The whale was created by StudioKCA of New York City, run by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang. The creators explain that is it a baby whale 12 metres high made from five tonnes of plastic, including a 1970s drum kit for some reason. Klimoski said that if anybody thinks this is a lot of plastic, imagine what’s floating around in the ocean. A lot of the whale’s plastic is from Hawaii where there’s a lot of plastic soup to be found. The rest of the plastic was fished out of rivers in New York state.

Why didn’t they use plastic from the North Sea to build an artwork in Bruges? Simply because they work in the US and that made more sense. Had they built the whale in Belgium, then they would have used plastic from the North Sea for sure. Although the plastic was found in the US, much of it comes from the European continent (namely Russia) and China, which gives people an idea how far plastic travels in the ocean.

(Link and photo: vice.com)

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January 18, 2019

Cat stows away on boat, dines on herring

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 4:00 pm

Earlier this week, Dutch fishing boat ‘Our Anna’ set off from Harlingen, Friesland to Danish waters when they heard a strange sound on board: it was a tortoise shell cat, hiding near the fish rinsing machine. They called her Katrien or Spikey and fed her a herring a day and gave her some water.

The kitty was scared and lost, but she’s fine now. The fishers are convinced she gained some weight on her trip as well.

Tomorrow the boat comes back to port, and with the help of the animal ambulance, they will sort out who the cat’s owner is because the cat cannot stay on board.

(Link and photo (and cute video): ad.nl)

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January 8, 2019

Don’t let horses lick your car

Filed under: Animals,Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 11:46 am

Some of you might be rolling their eyes, others like me are surprised: apparently horses like to lick car paint, damaging cars, and one Dutch nature association in Nijmegen, Gelderland is warming people about it with the pictogram above.

I have zero scientific knowledge of why horses like car paint and metallic paint in particular, so I’m going with a Google search for plausible answers:

– They like shiny things
– They really need salt
– Lack of nutrients from the plants in their pasture (I vote for this one)
– Boredom
– They like the taste of metal

In any case, it’s bad for them and bad for your car! And it’s like chips (crisps) for humans: once they taste it, they want more.

The idea is to park your car far away from the horses. Having to explain horse damage to your insurance company is probably difficult as well.

(Link and pictogram: naturetoday.com)

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November 28, 2018

Goose’s honking betrays huge XTC lab

Filed under: Animals,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:40 pm
geese02.jpg

In the village of Sint Willebrord, North Brabant, people were illegally producing XTC in a large lab in some warehouse, making barrels of cash while keeping their activities on the down low.

Then, one day the cops came knocking on the lab door because they heard a goose honking like the end of the world was coming, on the train tracks near their secret lab.

The goose was a regular at the neighbour’s property, but possibly didn’t like the weird noises it heard and when it heard them, started honking like crazy, waking up the neighbour in the middle of the night. The neighbour then woke up to see a suspicious van making several runs in the night, put two and two together and figured out drugs were being produced.

The neighbour then told the police what she saw, and that’s when the cops went to check it all out.

The cops arrested the 70-year-old owner who claimed to know nothing, saying he rented the warehouse to some guys who paid him cash up front and refused to let him see what they were doing. The owner’s lawyer attacked the woman’s claim, saying ‘she honks as loud as the goose does’, but stick and stones, the man is looking at three years in prison.

The cops had a good day, seizing 1.2 million euro worth of raw materials for producing XTC pills. They said the whole place smelled of anise, a characteristic smell of synthetic drugs. The theory is that the goose wasn’t honking over noise, but about the smell of anise, which attracted it, if we believe the Internet. And since the drugs were made at night, the smell was then at its strongest.

The moral of this story is that the cops were not sent on a wild goose chase.

(Link: vice.com)

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November 24, 2018

Instagram cat gets own student ID in Groningen

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 5:47 pm

Professor doctor Doerak (pronounced ‘Durak’, from Russian Дурак) is his name and he is well-known character at the University of Groningen, where he frequents law school classes.

That is why this cat of Instagram received his own student ID card a few weeks ago. His owners, who live next to one of the university buildings in the city centre, requested their cat got a student card. The administration replied: “We are working on it. An invitation to pick it up will follow.”

Jorien Bakker, spokesperson of the university, told local university magazine UKrant: “We liked the idea. Doerak is a sweet cat. He is a good student and we appreciate how much he means to students and staff.”

(Illustration: screenshot of Durak’s Instagram account)

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October 24, 2018

Bats stop Doutzen Kroes for renovating her villa

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 1:18 pm

kroes1.jpg

World renown Dutch model Doutzen Kroes has to put her plans for renovating her 1920s villa worth two million euro on hold because a colony of bats has decided to move in. In the Netherlands, bats are a protected species and can’t be chased out of their homes.

Renovations were apparently set to cost one million euro and be finished by the summer of 2019, so that Kroes and her family could move in. The bats have thwarted any renovation plans for the near future, as the city of Huizen, North Holland were the villa is located, has put a stop to any works. Some sort of ‘humane’ traps have been placed in nearby trees to get the bats out, but nobody can predict how that’s going to pan out.

However, this does sounds like a fantastic Halloween house.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl)

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