Oostvaardersplassen: Animal Utopia or Animal Concentration Camp?

Rewilding means ... reacquainting ourselves with death

I.

Even Isabella Tree has to admit that the experimental nature reserve established by Dutch ecologist Frans Vera - which inspired her and her husband's own Knepp Wildland Project - is controversial as well as extraordinary and may very well determine whether rewilding is taken seriously as an idea or written off as a green fantasy.  

Covering an area of 23 square miles, the Oostvaardersplassen is established on land that was only recently reclaimed from a huge freshwater lake. Part wetland and part a dry area, the former, with its large reedbeds, is home to a great many waterbirds as well as other animals that thrive in an aquatic environment. 

It's the dry zone, however, with its starving four-legged inmates, that attracts the controversy ...


II.

Before the establishment of the reserve, the dry area was a nursery for willow trees and there were soon hundreds of seedlings sprouting up all over. This led to concern that a dense woodland would quickly develop, significantly reducing the value of the habitat for wildlife that requires open space.

And so, excited by Vera's theories to do with forest history and the role played by grazing animals in habitat creation, the park introduced a number of large herbivores, including primeval-looking Konik ponies, magnificent red deer, and dark-coated Heck cattle with their sharp, curved horns (and Nazi associations). 

These animals, it was hoped, would encourage the development of an ecosystem and flat, grassy landscape thought to resemble those that existed on European river banks and deltas before human influence, allowing biodiversity to flourish.  The plan was to keep the beasts out in the open all year round, living as close to an authentic life in the wild as possible. For minimal intervention was the name of the game at Oostvaarderspassen.

Initially, the numbers introduced to the reserve were modest; 32 Heck cattle in 1983; 20 Konik ponies in 1984; and 37 red deer in 1992. Again, the idea was to allow populations to grow naturally and, with no predators present, that's exactly what they did. Indeed, the animals multiplied faster than anticipated; soon there were hundreds of ponies and cattle and thousands of deer. 

And then, of course, during the first severe winter, they started to die-off just as rapidly - and in full view of the public. Unfortunately, the sight of starving animals and decomposing bodies being fed on by carrion, isn't one which modern Europeans are emotionally prepared for. Inevitably, there were angry protests from animal lovers concerned about cruelty and Vera received hate mail and death threats. Some compared Oostvaardersplassen to Auschwitz ...      

III.

To be fair, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of this project; perhaps it was irresponsible to adopt such a laissez-faire approach to animal welfare in what is, ultimately, an enclosed reserve, limited in size, built upon flat, exposed land with very little natural shelter, in a part of the world where winters can be extremely harsh.

Ultimately, Oostvaarderspassen is not the Serengeti or the Okavango Delta in Botswana! It's too small and impoversished a space to simply allow large animals to breed willy-nilly and without the possibility of being able to migrate and seek out new food sources.   

Having said that, I'm glad to know that Frans Vera is unrepentant (and addresses many of the criticisms and concerns directly):

"'Yet again, our view of nature is being dictated by the conventions of human control. The baseline for the welfare of farm animals is being applied to animals living in the wild [...] The fact that animals live in the Oostvaardersplassen have a free life in a natural environment - they are not cooped up in some factory farm; they aren't pushed around by humans every day; they have normal sex rather than artificial insemination; they have a natural herd structure allowing calves to stay with their mothers; they can graze and browse what they are designed to eat, not what is artificially concocted for them by the farming industry - none of this seems to matter. The fixation is solely on their death not the quality of their lives.
      In particular, people believe these deaths are numerous and "unnatural" because there is a fence around the reserve preventing the animals from migrating in search of food - but cyclical die-offs happen even in the migrating populations of Africa. And in places where animals cannot migrate [...] the dynamic is the same. Starvation is the determining factor. It is a fundamental process of nature.'" 

As a thanatologist, I think that's true: that all life rests upon death. Nevertheless, public outcry in the Netherlands and elsewhere has forced a change of policy at the Oostvaardersplassen. Now animals deemed to be on their last legs or suffering too much, are shot and the bodies of the ponies and cows taken away to be cleanly incinerated.

Only the deer - since they are categorised as fully wild animals - are left to rot and be eaten by the foxes, rats, crows, beetles, and bacteria in a picnic of life and death ...

See: Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 69.

For a related post to this one - in praise of the Knepp Farm Project - click here.

The Blue Boy Will Never Die: On Fear, Fashion and Immortality

Gainsborough: The Blue Boy (c.1770)

According to D. H. Lawrence, the northern consciousness is gripped by a fear - almost a horror - of the body, especially in its sexual implications. This naturally has a detrimental effect on the plastic arts which "depend entirely on the representation of substantial bodies, and on the intuitional perception of the reality of substantial bodies". 

Thus, whilst English painters are very good at painting people hidden away inside their clothes, they daren't handle the living flesh that lies beneath; the social persona becomes more important than the actual man or woman.      

This may of course contain an element of truth. But isn't it also possible, as Cioran suggests, that what really terrifies is not the body in its erotico-libidinal aspect, but the body as an object prone to disease, ageing and death; that, ultimately, clothes don't serve to get between us and life in all its naked beauty, but us and nothingness ...    

"Look at your body in a mirror: you will realise you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs [...] and you will see how close you are to the grave." 

Maybe that's why Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough et al cared so much about painting subjects in all their finery; not simply because they were bourgeois - and not in order to deny the "gleam of the warm procreative body" - but because it's only when he has his glad rags on that man is able to entertain ideas of immortality: how can we die when we wear a pair of blue satin knee-breeches?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lawrence knows that it's not the sexual body so much as the diseased body that scares the pants on people, which is why he spends most of this essay discussing the cultural and psychological consequences of syphilis [click here for a discussion of this elsewhere on this blog]. He also knows the importance of clothes, even if, as here, he likes to think flesh as more important than fashion and imply that human nakedness has greater authenticity than our sartorial splendour.  

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section entitled 'Sartorial Philosophy' in chapter 6, 'Abdications'. 

Gainsborough's Blue Boy is quite clearly a costume study as well as a portrait; the shimmering blue satin of the clothes is rendered in a spectrum of cleverly calibrated tints and applied with a complexity of fine brush strokes. It's a picture in which Jonathan Buttall, the son a wealthy merchant, achieves his immortality. The work now hangs in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.