Worldlog Week 41 – 2008

After a successful and inspiring premiere of Meat the Truth in Hollywood I got back to the Netherlands last Wednesday. People reacted very enthusiastically and we arranged meetings to investigate the possibility of distributing the film through the entirety of the United States.

Meat the Truth has meanwhile been selected and/or nominated for different significant American film festivals such as the Montana CINE Festival in Missoula, Montana, the 7th Annual Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival in Nevada City, California and the 56th Columbus International Film and Video Festival, otherwise known as “The Chris Awards.

I've been working hard this week on my contribution to the debate about the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) and the Socialist Party (SP)'s “Fur Bearing Animal Breeding Ban Act” proposal.

This Act will give mink breeders ten years to dismantle their businesses. I would prefer they stopped immediately, especially as they've been talking about a ban for 25 years now, however a slow but sure reorganisation of this industry is a good option.

In 2002, the Paars II coalition, the Dutch cabinet that governed from 3 August 1998 to 22 July 2002, had a proposal to ban mink breeding, but that was swept from the table by the following cabinet, Balkenende I.

Since then, fur breeders have doubled the amount of minks they breed, even though they know that the vast majority of the Dutch population support a ban! They therefore made a conscious decision to invest in breeding farms that could still be banned.

The ChristianUnion Party and the Party for Freedom (PVV) appear to not want to support the current Act proposal, whereas in their campaigns and earlier debates they stated they were for a fur bearing animal breeding ban!

The large majority of Dutch parliament voted for the Party for the Animals' motion to put an end to the circumvention of the ban on docking horses' tails. Docking horses' tails has been banned in the Netherlands since 2001, however people are circumventing this law by having their horses' tails docked in France. Docking is still allowed in France for cultural-historic reasons and it is estimated that hundreds of Dutch foals have their tails docked there each year. This week, the Party for the Animals' motion that requests measures be taken to stop this sneak route was adopted. The motion was co-signed by the PvdA.

Last week I published an opinion piece in the Financieel Dagblad about the credit crisis in relation to our greed, and how we could build a better world by letting the credit crisis, the climate crisis, the food shortage crisis, the drinking water crisis and the animal sickness crises be our turning-point. Click here to read the article in English.

See you next week!