RADIOACTIVE BOARS!

In the news lately, they've been talking about these feral pigs in Germany that are called wild boars, and they are RADIOACTIVE!  And the way they got that way is that 25 years ago, which was a long time before I was even born, there was an accident at a place in Russia called Chernobyl, where they were making nuclear energy.  And after the accident, this radioactive stuff kind of drifted through the air all over Europe, and some of it is still there, even after all this time.

So what is happening with the wild boars in Germany is that they are very busy making baby boars, and the number of boars keeps growing and growing.  In most places, boars have 4 or 5 piglets in a litter, but in Germany, they have 6 or 8 piglets.  The piglets are very cute, with stripes, kind of like chipmunks, but then they grow up to be big, mean-looking boars.  And anyway, what the boars like to eat is stuff like mushrooms and truffles, which grow in the ground and suck up all the icky radioactive stuff that ended up there.

Then after the boars eat the radioactive mushrooms, their meat might be radioactive, so it's not very safe for people to eat.  Except that you would probably have to eat a whole bunch of it every single day for years before it really made you sick.  But now the German people have to test the boar meat to find out if it is safe or not before they eat it.

And the hunters who are supposed to be shooting the boars and keeping the number of them under control don't like to hunt them so much anymore because they don't make a lot of money doing it, even though the government pays them something to make up for the fact that they can't sell their boar meat to restaurants.

So there are lots of boars running around in Germany, and sometimes they are trying to live in the same places that people are trying to live.  So a boar might wander into a supermarket or a church service.  Or sometimes they get in the road and cause people to have wrecks.

Wild boars are not like the nice pink pigs you see living on farms.  They are big and they have stiff, bristly hair and sharp tusks.  A boar can weigh between 200 and 400 pounds, so it's not the kind of small cuddly animal you want to have as a pet in your apartment.  Wild boars are native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa.  And now they also live in the Americas and Australia because people brought them there so they could hunt them and eat them.  In America, wild boars are usually called razorbacks, and they like to go to college at the University of Arkansas.

I wish I could eat some wild boar meat because it looks really juicy and yummy in the photos, but I don't want to eat it if it's radioactive because I'm afraid it might do something weird to me, like maybe turn me into a cat!