When you see his pigs rolling in the mud, with a curl in the tail and the sun on their heads, you understand Kees Scheepens. “That curl means that they feel good, like a dog wagging its tail. And that rolling in the mud is called ‘swallowing’ – a basic necessity of pigs. This is how they regulate their temperature. The word has already disappeared from the Dikke Van Dale because it hardly happens anywhere anymore.” 250 large pigs, piglets of a few weeks old – and everything in between – graze on three hectares of mud and grass. Some lie resting in the sun for hours. “A lazy pig: there is a reason for that expression.”
Four million pigs live within a radius of 50 kilometers around his pig farm in Oirschot, Brabant, says Scheepens. They are nowhere to be seen, because they are in stables. Only here on his property do you see pigs walking outside. The driver of the truck that delivers the weekly meal of organic chunks gets out and stands there for fifteen minutes looking tenderly at the animals. “He likes it here because he doesn’t see any pigs anywhere, even though he visits fifty farms a week,” says Scheepens.
Scheepens (66) wears jeans, wellies and a red-checked shirt. A happy life, even better than a life worth livinghe says happily about his pigs. He sometimes uses English because he regularly has to address farmers, scientists and activists abroad about his life’s work: returning the pig from a production unit that must produce a tasty piece of bacon, ham or pork steak as efficiently as possible to an animal with a dignified existence.
Last Thursday, the House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture debated ‘animal husbandry’. The ambition of a parliamentary majority wants ten percent of all agricultural animals in the Netherlands to lead an ‘animal-dignified existence’ until slaughter by 2030. Now this only applies to one percent, according to figures published this week by the Animal Protection Society and Caring Farmers. By 2040, in fifteen years’ time, according to the House of Representatives, at least 100 percent of all farm animals must be removed a life worth living to have.
Kees Scheepens with his pigs.
Photo John van Hamond
Thousands of pigs euthanized
There is a long way to go, says Kees Scheepens. His story started during his PhD research as a veterinarian when he studied the consequences of drafts on the welfare of pigs. He laughs shyly. “I became completely interested in those animals. They are so intelligent, hygienic and strong.” And then came the swine fever. As a young veterinarian in North Limburg, Scheepens had to euthanize thousands of pigs. One after another he gave an injection. It made him unhappy, also because they had become ill so en masse because they lived so close together. Afterwards you would have been suffering, in English jargon, moral injury mention: because of his work at a veterinary practice, he had to do something that all veterinarians had to do at the time, but which he found objectionable. So much so that he stopped working as a veterinarian. He was 42 years old.
This Thursday afternoon he will not follow the parliamentary debate; he is busy moving the pigs to a greener piece of land further away. And hey, he pretty much invented animal life, at least that of pigs, over the past 25 years on this farm. It did not make him rich, he emphasizes. He can get by, that’s all. The land is not his, he leases it, even though his family is from Oirschot and his ancestors were all farmers until 22 generations ago.
You have to start seeing meat as a chocolate – something you might eat every week, from animals that have lived a good life
He also earns something from the veterinary advice he gives to other farmers – you are a veterinarian for life – and from the ten breeding boars (male pigs) that he sells for breeding. With his 35 sows he sells 300 fattening pigs for slaughter every year. But because his pigs are doing so well – during their muddy, free life with lots of space, they are fed organic feed, which is twice as expensive as other feed – he has little to gain from it. Every farmer who wants to give his animals a slightly more animal-like life, Scheepens says firmly, needs financial support for this.
This is also discussed in the parliamentary debate. ‘Frontrunners’ should receive financial support, for example, it is said. And changing from ‘conventional’ farming to ‘animal-worthy’ farming takes a long time and costs a lot, underlines State Secretary Silvio Erkens (VVD) 150 kilometers away. That debate is about new basic standards, an authority that must monitor and the consequences for exports (75 percent of Dutch pigs are exported) if a dignified existence for livestock makes Dutch meat too expensive.
Photo John van Hamond
Scheepens does not believe in a massive switch to veganism. Man, he says, needs dairy and meat. He does eat more of it than is good for him, but the need is unmistakable. You should start to see meat as a chocolate, he says – something you eat every week, perhaps, where the animals have lived a good life and for which you therefore pay more than for a pork steak or beef steak with 1 star, the minimum requirement for the ‘Better Life’ quality mark.
The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) mentioned stricter rules and more supervision on the keeping, transport and slaughter of pigs, cattle and sheep by the end of 2025. “urgent and a collective taskOne example from the series of abuses that the NVWA finds: cutting off pig tails, “still happens a lot.” The aim is to prevent the piglets from biting each other, which they do because they live too close together and cannot root in the soil.
No livestock transport at 30 degrees Celsius
In The Hague, MPs Esther Ouwehand (PvdD), Caroline van der Plas (BBB), Dion Graus (PVV) and veterinarian Renate den Hollander (VVD) will discuss the transports that are much too hot for animals in the summer on Thursday. From next year, a truck full of pigs or calves will not be allowed to drive at temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius. Night transport is advocated because it is cooler then. Scheepens: “Pigs cannot sweat, they cannot lose their heat like we humans.” He once filmed three trucks full of pigs waiting in the heat on a slaughterhouse site. “The normal breathing of a pig is 30 times per minute. Heat stress leads to 180 breaths per minute. This cannot be observed with the naked eye.”
The House committee discusses violence against cows just before they are slaughtered, and that cameras should be installed at every slaughterhouse to record abuse. The committee members mention the stable fires, which kill thousands of trapped animals every year.
Scheepens: “Debates often focus on ‘ammonia emission reduction’ – a nice Scrabble word.” He himself designed the ‘intelligent pig toilet’, which keeps the animals’ poop and urine separated and does not produce ammonia. Because ammonia smell, which in normal farms rises from the cellars under the metal grids on which the pigs live, is bad for (among other things) the pig’s lungs.
His own pigs live outside and poop and pee on their own in different places. In winter, inside, they use his special toilet. “My intelligent toilet suits the pig, which is naturally hygienic.” Most farmers use air scrubbers to avoid putting too much pressure on nature. In the stable, says Scheepens, the ammonia stench from the manure cellars continues to plague the pigs.
One practice that must stop immediately, according to Scheepens, is castration of piglets. “Those pigs have lost their business and have wounds there that are going to become infected.” It happens because pork from uncastrated males has a foul ‘boar odor’ in 10 percent of cases. But there is another way to remove meat with a bad smell, Scheepens explains: putting someone with a good nose on the slaughterhouse assembly line. This happens with the meat of his pigs, because they are never castrated.
Kees Scheepens’ pig farm in Oirschot. The animals like shade.
PHOTO John van Hamond
Securing giving birth sows between metal bars, so that they do not lie on their newborn piglets and crush them to death, is also mentioned in the NVWA report. In any case, says Scheepens, sows are bred in such a way that they are maximally fertile and give birth to an average of fifteen piglets per litter, and sometimes even twenty. Nature, says Scheepens, determines that a sow has twelve piglets. Because she has twelve nipples.
But the big gain is in the numbers, the intensity of agriculture. He calculates: one ‘normal’ sow gives birth to about fifteen piglets 2.4 times a year. One hundred conventional sows therefore produce 3,600 piglets per year, which means that 69 piglets can be sent to slaughter every week. Large pig farmers have more than a thousand sows. Together there will be 2025 CBS approximately 14 million pigs were sent to slaughter in the Netherlands.
Scheepens becomes angry for a moment when he talks about the way pigs are usually killed: with CO2-gas “A completely cruel asphyxiation in a cellar invisible to a visitor.” The slaughterer of his own piglets gives them an electric shock through the head, causing them to suddenly lose their sensation.
The largest pig farmer in the Netherlands, Martin Houben, is currently being bought out by the government. He kept 5,000 sows and 45,000 fattening pigs in six places in Limburg. He once came to visit Kees Scheepens, he says. “He liked it here. And he said: you are on the right track.”
