On this farm, cows are in charge, or at least coequals

“We need to think about how we can live differently, and we need to leave animals in peace.” – KARIN MüCK

BUTJADINGEN, Germany — Tom will lay his head in the lap of anyone who sits down to rub his neck, while Tilda prefers just to nuzzle her young son. Cuddles are not really Chaya’s thing, but if she is in the mood, she will play pugnaciously with a bale of hay as if it is a giant ball.

On any other farm, these three friends would no longer be alive. Tom was too small, Tilda too ill and Chaya too aggressive to survive on a modern industrial farm. Each was condemned to the slaughterhouse.

Instead, the trio found their way to Hof Butenland, an ex-dairy farm turned animal retirement home that offers sanctuary to cattle, pigs, a few horses, chickens, geese and rescue dogs.

No animal is there to serve a human need; all coexist as equals with Hof Butenland’s human residents and workers.

“We need to think about how we can live differently, and we need to leave animals in peace,” said Karin Mück. She and her partner Jan Gerdes, both in their mid-60s, run Hof Butenland on the windswept flatlands of Germany’s Butjadingen peninsula, which juts into the North Sea.

The idea of shifting away from meat and dairy products may sound revolutionary in a country better known for juicy bratwurst and Frisbee-sized schnitzel, along with afternoon indulgences of coffee topped with frothy milk and cheesecake.

But Germans are consuming less meat — last year only 126 pounds per person, the lowest amount since 1989 — while the number of vegans has steadily increased to 2 million.

Increasingly, even Germans who eat meat are purchasing vegan products as concerns over how livestock is kept are encouraging people to turn away from animal products, said Ulrich Hamm, a professor of agricultural sciences at Kassel University, who has studied trends in food consumption for decades.

For the humans at Hof Butenland, the turn away from animals as commodities is not only a question of human morality but of planetary survival, given the role that industrial farms play in contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

“For me it is clear, if we want to save this planet, then we have to stop using and consuming animals,” Gerdes said over coffee, with a splash of oat milk. “We have the economic power to enact change, but we have to want it.”

Gerdes took over Butenland from his father and introduced organic practices to the region in the 1980s. But even on an organic farm, he could not avoid what he called the “brutality” of how dairy cows are treated to produce milk: removing newly born calves from their mothers, who for years are inseminated again and again.

His discomfort with the process — and decades spent listening to calves cry out for their mothers — ultimately led Gerdes to quit the dairy business and adopt a policy of total egalitarianism for all the species calling the farm home.

Now the animals are free to roam from the red brick barns built in 1841, down the tree-lined lane to the nearly 100 acres of grass-rich pasture and back again, at their own pace and on their own time. There are no milking hours to be met, and the pigs, buried deep in a pile of straw, regularly sleep long past noon.

Lab animals have a special place in the heart of Mück, who spent weeks in solitary confinement in 1985 on suspicion of building a terrorist group, after she was caught breaking into a lab to free animals being used for experi ments. Alone in her cell, she had a revelation.

“One day I realized, it is the same thing that happens to the animals,” she said. “You don’t see the sun, you are separated from your friends, you have no idea what is going on around you, and you have no control over your own life.”

After 20 years working as a psychiatric nurse, she met Gerdes just as he was preparing to quit farming and sell off Hof Butenland, including his herd. But when a trailer came to collect the cattle, a dozen did not fit.

Gerdes turned them back out to pasture and decided to leave them there, undisturbed, for good. The sanctuary was born.