Worldlog week 26 - 2013 - Hoofdinhoud

Victory in the Dutch village of Daarle! The cabinet has put a provisional stop to nature sales in the Netherlands. The reason for this, according to State Secretary Dijksma, is the social unrest created by the nature sales. We played a significant role in organising the Growing Resistance movement against nature sales. We used a crowd funding campaign to collect a quarter of a million Euros in just over two weeks time to protect our most vulnerable nature reserves. And we were successful too! We bought almost 100,000 square metres of nature during the auction. The nature reserves our party won will go down in history as a monument to growing civil resistance!

A government that sells complete badger families and their environments to the highest bidder, in a place where selling endangered animal species is against the law, requires Dutch citizens to resist. A government that knows what everything costs, but does not know its value needs to be subject to pressure from concerned citizens. And it seems to be working! We’ve won the first battle - government policy that goes against our nature will not make it!

We’ve achieved a milestone for animal welfare this week: we’ve finally scrapped being allowed to keep exotic animals as pets. This week, after years of effort by both our party and animal protection organisations, State Secretary Dijksma presented the Positieflist (Positive List). As of 2014, private individuals and businesses may only keep animals that are on this list. Animals that are not on the list, such as racoons, Bengal cats and hedgehogs, are no longer allowed as pets, to be bred, or sold. What a breakthrough!

This is a wonderful story about urban agriculture in Seattle! It’s not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest. And this story too by Ron Finley, a highly driven Guerrilla Gardner in LA, don’t miss this one! It’s great to see how private individuals’ initiatives can have such a great effect on neighbourhoods and on people’s health and the environment.

Today sees the start of the Yulin Dog Meat Festival. And thanks to international protests, this very well could be the last one - which would be nice! Watch this video for images, but please note: the images are shocking.

A small town in Alaska has had a cat as its mayor for 15 years now. =^.^= The populace of a town in Mexico can also vote for a cat. It started as a joke: ‘Tired of voting for rats? Vote for a cat’ but Morris the cat could actually become the mayor of Xalapa.

These week I asked parliamentary questions about donkeys being hanged in Bonaire. I want to know how the plan is going for feral donkeys that the Public Body of Bonaire was to develop. We must fight these kinds of practices! Click here for a shocking photo of the donkeys.

I also asked parliamentary questions about the disproportionate violence the Turkish government used against demonstrators in Istanbul. The police in Turkey chose to use chemical weapons against the demonstrators, which is entirely unacceptable. Animals also suffer enormously from the police’s attacks. People in Istanbul have told me that on Taksim Square alone, 8 dogs, 63 cats, and 1028 birds have been killed by government violence.

See you next week, Marianne