Due to the corona pandemic, Het Beloofde Varkensland in Amstelveen was unable to reflect extensively on its 25th anniversary last year. This year, that damage will be made up for, with another event as a benchmark. “It’s been 25 years since my first piglet came,” says founder Dafne Westerhof in the NH radio program Lunchroom. “That was Aagje. I picked her up in Middelie.”
“It was an experience, of course,” she says about the first year of the Bofkont Family at Het Beloofde Varkensland. “There have been many pigs by now, but the very first one is the greatest memory.”
In the years before that, Dafne worked as a communications consultant in Amsterdam’s PC Hooftstraat, but she wanted to ‘provide a positive counterweight to the bio-industry’, she says. “Then I went to an agricultural school in Barneveld in my high heels, and one of the first lessons I received there was ‘birth care piglets’.”
Tails, teeth and balls
A strong stomach was not an unnecessary luxury. “We had to burn off the tails of the newborn piglets, grind out the teeth and remove their balls from the male piglets, all without anesthesia. I refused. I said to the teacher: I will not do that for a thousand years. ”
Despite her aversion to the usual production methods, she decides to stay. And the teacher allows her to stay too. “He saw that it was serious,” says Dafne, “that I wanted to do something with it.”
The Beloofde Varkensland on Bovenkerkerweg in Amstelveen is run by volunteers. In 2017, the main building of the care farm was hit by a devastating fire. Most pigs escaped unhurt, a few were injured. After a call from NH’s June Hoogcarspel, there were such a week later fifty volunteers ready to literally help Dafne out of the fire.
Dafne had to promise not to constantly argue and sabotage his class, but then she could continue her studies. “I knew I wouldn’t get that close to factory farming again, and I had to see how it goes, otherwise I wouldn’t have a right to speak.”
She already dreams of redeeming doomed piglets and calves at the cattle market, she says. She already had an ideal place in mind. “How wonderful it would be if I could find a farm under the smoke of Amsterdam. And that all came true.”
Link with pigs
Aagje is no longer alive, but Het Beloofde Varkensland now offers shelter to about sixty members of the same species. And they only leave when ‘they fall over from old age’, says Dafne, who has built up a relationship with many pigs. “If you have them on from a piglet, you grow along with them. That is very nice to experience, the whole development.”
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Pigs that grow up free from an early age have a completely different character than the locked up pigs in the bio-industry, says Dafne. Think twice before ransoming a pig, is her advice. “Because before you know it there’s a whopper of a pig next to you, and they’re demolishing everything.”
Highly sensitive
Pigs are not only super intelligent, they are also very sensitive, according to Dafne. She discovered this by chance when she applied her massage techniques to the frightened pig Aagje. She has now completed more than 900 pig massage workshops.
“If you’ve stimulated the spot near the armpit, they fall over and they surrender 100 percent, and then if you can give back 100 percent, and you start massaging them, some people have tears running down their cheeks . You become zen, you completely merge.”
View images of the care farm below, the day after the fire in 2017. Read on under video
Large animals survive devastating fire at pig shelter: “A miracle of God” – NH/Bart van Zutphen
Most people who attend the workshops are not vegetarians, says the pig farmer. And she doesn’t judge that. “I hope the pigs seduce them, but I have no idea what happens next and I don’t want to get involved.”
Although there is still a lot to be gained, a lot has already been improved, Dafne emphasises. That pregnant sows are no longer locked in cages, but can walk around between other pregnant sows, for example. “That’s fantastic progress, because pigs are social creatures.”
Pig nursing home
Because she is getting older herself, Dafne will select her pigs more strictly. “They are getting older, they need more and more medicines, so you have a whole pig nursing home. That will no longer be possible in the long term. But I will continue to buy the mother pigs free, because they work so terribly hard and then also have their pension. small numbers.”
Listen to the full interview below.
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