Article by Marianne Miltenburg
Photos courtesy of Harry Voss
He came up with the warning sign for crossing toads, but Harry Voss is far more than the man behind that single idea. He is an animal rescuer through and through. While most people shake their heads at images of animal suffering on television or online before quickly moving on, Harry puts on his coat and heads straight to where help is needed.
Born in Apeldoorn in 1951, Harry became a volunteer for the World Wildlife Fund at an early age, making him one of the Netherlands’ first animal rights activists. The neighbourhood where he grew up bordered woodland, and it was there that his love of wildlife first took root, nurtured by encounters with wild boar and amphibians.
“The hooligans of the forest,” he calls the wild boar that roam the woods around Apeldoorn. “I feel the urge to be out in the field almost every day, preferably in the Kroondomein.”
To this day, he channels that passion into practical work for organisations including Wakker Dier, Faunabescherming (the Dutch Wildlife Protection Society) and the Party for the Animals.
After retiring, Harry found a new role in Apeldoorn’s municipal council, where he represented the Party for the Animals for many years. But the proverbial “retirement behind the geraniums” was never for him. The moment he left the council chamber, he continued his activism with undiminished determination.
Nor does he let claims about the supposed necessity of hunting wild boar go unchallenged.
“People often ask me whether there won’t be too many wild boar if we stop hunting them. But wildlife populations regulate themselves. Did you know that wild boar actually produce more piglets when they experience fear and stress? Hunting therefore leads to more boar, not fewer.”
His alternative is both simple and well thought out: give the animals enough space, prevent them from wandering onto roads, and introduce lower speed limits on the Veluwe.
“There is so much you can do to live alongside wild boar in a responsible way.”
His admiration for the animals is genuine and undisguised.
“Wild boar are so unpretentious. They have such a primal, rugged appearance.”
Yet behind that tough exterior lies a remarkably gentle animal. Female wild boar are devoted, protective mothers that give birth in separate nests and nurse their young for three to four months. They fiercely defend their piglets whenever danger threatens.
“These animals are the victims of some of the greatest suffering experienced by wildlife. They cannot speak up for themselves. That’s why I do it for them.”
And Harry is far from slowing down. In 2018, under the auspices of Faunabescherming, he founded the Wild Boar Society – From Fair Game to Safe from Bullets!
“It sounds rather mysterious, and it is,” he says with a smile. “But hunting clubs are just as secretive, and this is our counterpart.”
Through the society, he lobbies municipalities, provincial authorities and campsite owners to improve animal welfare. For example, he urged the municipality of Heerde to install wildlife fencing instead of intensifying the hunting of wild boar.
Sometimes his activism is highly visible. In 2020, when the annual hunting season for newborn wild boar piglets resumed—while many were still dependent on their mothers’ milk—the Wild Boar Society staged a protest at a roundabout in Apeldoorn. Members dressed a sculpture of a mother boar and her piglets in bulletproof vests: a playful yet powerful protest intended to draw attention to what Harry calls the annual “Herod hunt of the newborns”.
Every year, thousands of wild boar are killed in the Netherlands. Most are found on the Veluwe, the country’s largest wild boar habitat, where animals die through culling, road accidents and, increasingly, attacks by wolves. The exact number varies from year to year, depending on population size and food availability. In extreme years such as 2021, around 5,000 wild boar were shot on the Veluwe in just a few months as part of population control measures.
“And that,” Harry Voss says without hesitation, “is 5,000 too many.”
His life’s work has inspired others as well. In November 2023, the book Harry Voss and the Hooligans of the Forest was published. Written by Aad van der Waal, with a foreword by acclaimed children’s author Bibi Dumon Tak, the book intertwines Harry’s childhood memories and decades of activism with twenty poems about wild boar—a literary tribute to a man who has devoted half his life to defending animals that cannot defend themselves.
