Alert! Radioactive boars on two continents

In Japan, the government is attempting to resettle several towns evacuated after 2011’s Fukushima disaster. Resettlement is a complicated task. It’s made no simpler by radioactive boars.

As Reuters reports, when human beings evacuated the exclusion zone, boars descended from their mountain homes. In typically porcine fashion, they began to eat whatever could be swallowed, including lots of “radioactive vegetation.” Now—sounding like candidates for a demented Bruce Springsteen song—they “scour the empty streets and overgrown backyards.” Worse, these radioactive eating machines “have been known to attack people.” Teams of hunters now roam the region, aiming to free it from its piggish scourge; reportedly, some 300 animals have been “captured” since last April in the town of Tomioka alone.

But that’s just Asia. The radioactive boar story straddles two continents. In the Czech Republic—as reported, again, by Reuters—radioactive boars are injecting a hint of danger into the consumption of goulash. The problem is that Czech boars eat false truffles. False truffles contain cesium-137, which traveled west on the wind during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The implications for goulash are obvious. In recent years, a full 47 percent of boars tested—and they all must be tested—were judged too radioactive for inclusion in hearty, regional stews.

Reuters simply owns radioactive boars. The rest of the journalistic world gapes in awe.