Marriage of industry and nature Wild fowl and exotic animals live happily beside a brewery Docile and wild Mr. Dikken also owns 40 sheep. They are a great help in keeping down the grass and for that reason are much appreciated by the gardeners. Of course they are docile. But there are also about a hundred hares - quite wild - which race around the concrete buildings. They regard the Heineken plant as a kind of sanctuary, for all the surrounding land is hunting territory. Their numbers are kept within the acceptable proportion of one hare to every three acres by crows and their kin. These birds feed on the young which are too weak to escape when attacked. This means that only the strongest animals survive. Pheasants imported The hares came on their own decision, but there are pheasants which were imported. They have lived there for some months past and seem to be doing well. But Mr. Dikken has to feed them every day, so uncanny precision - at any unwelcome vi sitor. They do not roam far but have plea- sant living quarters, especially construc ted for them, and are carefully looked af ter. But there are other animals which do not need coddling. One of the first Heineken employees bas ed at the Zoeterwoude brewery on a per manent posting was Teun Dikken, con struction supervisor. When he arrived on the site there were only green meadows, a dilapidated old mill, a few trees, and many animals wandering freely about an area where a huge plant was soon to be built. Mr. Dikken loves animals, and though he is still hard at word on construction activi ties his second job is the care of the living creatures on the vast 160-acre site of Hei- neken's Zoeterwoude plant. He certainly has some most peculiar guests. Zoo animals Artis, Amsterdam's well-known zoologi cal garden, suffers from a shortage of space and Heineken has offered some of its grassland as a home for a few of the zoo's animals accustomed to wide open spaces. These include the Banteng, a kind of Indonesian cow, and a couple of vicu nas, a sort of llama which has an unplea sant habit of spitting - copiously and with 4

Jaarverslagen en Personeelsbladen Heineken

Heineken Contact | 1980 | | pagina 4