The population of wild boars has been increasingly dramatically in Germany recently. And these are not just any old wild boars. Many of them are highly radioactive. Regular wild boars are bad enough without one having to deal with radioactive wild boars. In fact, about the only thing worse would be a rabid radioactive wild boar.
The source of the radioactivity is caesium-137 which escaped from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 and was absorbed by truffles deep in the ground. The hogs are now devouring the truffles and incorporating the caesium. Hopefully, if they acquire superpowers as a result, they will use them only for good, not evil, but that seems unlikely.
In Saxony, hunters are required to have their slain boars tested for radioactivity, and the hot ones are confiscated. The government will give hunters the equivalent of about $200 US as compensation for each adult boar that cannot be eaten because of the contamination. As one out of every three boars is unfit for consumption because of the radiation, the total amount of payments has been massive.
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| Original photo By Jerzy Strzelecki (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons and subsequently modified |
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