It is a beautiful place to enjoy an afternoon, the forests at Sint Anthonis. But this nature reserve houses a horrible secret. Here you literally banse a large mass grave. The bodies of no less than 119,000 pets that have been finished have been buried here for decades.
It is 1961 when the Dutch pig sector is struck by a disaster that has not been shown until then. Mouth and mouth disease (MKZ) breaks out. A highly contagious disease that can also be transferred to sheep, goats and cattle, just like on deer, wild boar and deer.
Pigs that are infected awaits a terrible fate. Their nails, which are also called claws, fall out after a few days, causing their toes to turn into bloody stumps. The animals suffer a lot of pain, can no longer walk to their feeders and threaten to starve in this way.
Bacon and pork chops
The government starts the fight in the 1961 disaster year, but the disease continues to grab it. Brabant and Limburg in particular, where most pig farms are located, are hit hard. First the animals still go to slaughterhouses where they are transformed in bacon and pork chops. People can just eat the meat without getting sick. Although the recommendation is to cook the meat well before you push it in.
But it goes so fast with the epidemic that in 1962 the slaughterhouses can no longer handle the enormous influx. The government decides to engage a destruction company in Son. That has experience with processing dead animals, but finishing them on such a large scale is something completely new. Hundreds of thousands of animals kill a steel pin through their heads is a bridge too far.
The animals are housed in garage boxes at the company. Exhaust gases of military vehicles flow in the boxes and the animals die from the gas. More than 220,000 pigs are finished in this way. But even in Son they simply cannot handle the large number of animals that is being supplied. Converting all those animals into animal feed is impossible.
Soldiers
The army is switched on again. Soldiers dig long slots in the woods near Sint Anthonis. Trucks and other large vehicles are hurled together to drive the pigs in that direction. According to witnesses, the cars leak on all sides, the moisture of the pig dripping on the street, writes other times in one Reconstruction. Many people do not yet realize that there is a FMD crisis going on. “It seemed as if it had rained,” says Jan Sommers who was a pig farmer at the time and lived on the way to the forest. “We knew nothing. We had no television and almost never listened to the radio.”
The soldiers work hard. Dead animals are fiddled in the pits, on top of a layer of bright lime. And that process is repeated a number of times so that there are considerable bumps that are eventually covered with a good layer of sand. And this creates a mass grave that contains no fewer than 119,000 pigs.
The large -scale approach works. The number of cases of disease is declining quickly and a few months later the number of infected companies, which was 2132 at the height of the epidemic, was reduced to just one. But the final toll is high. During the epidemic between 1961 and 1962 of 5647, contaminated companies, 319,386 pigs, 1251 cattle, 1085 sheep and 17 goats were completed.
Past
Aflied past is a weekly section about fun, remarkable or funny facts from the rich Brabant past. If you have a tip, mail to: [email protected].