Under normal circumstances I never want to encounter a wild boar. Ever. I mean they're not exactly the most even-tempered beasts. Plus, honestly, it isn't that good to eat either; as one chef notes, it "has a distinct taste and smell that can be likened to dirt." So even shooting one of these things to bag it for its meat isn't worth it.
And apparently in Germany if you shoot one it might just blow up:
The wild boars (Sus scrofa) that snuffle through the [Bavaria's] forests are so radioactive that the country has ruled them unsafe to eat — but why these animals are so contaminated has proved a puzzle.
Uh, yeah, okay, I have an answer to this freaky, alarming "puzzle:"
Actually I guess it's pretty important to figure this out. If you have animals turning up so irradiated that you can't even make them into dirt-flavored pork chops, you probably wanna figure out where that's coming from.
The obvious explanation is because of Chernobyl: The ill-fated power plant is fewer than 1,000 miles away, and the Bavarian mountains got a particularly rough hit of radiation when that plant blew up in 1986.
Yet while most everything in the region was hit with energy during the disaster, most of it has returned to normal levels in the intervening four decades. But not the wild boars. Why? Well, pigs have a habit of "snuffling" through the dirt to get at mushrooms buried underneath it — and that's a problem:
As rainfall slowly carries radioactive particles down through the soil, they accumulate in the tasty fungi, which are eventually rooted up by the hungry boars.
That's one possibility. Scientists also found in a recent survey that wild boar meat from the region "contained radioactive cesium from both Chernobyl and nuclear weapons fallout," meaning nuclear weapons testing has also contaminated the area, and the hogs that root throughout it.
One thing is certain: Between the meat that tastes like a basement and the Stage 4 cancer you can get from eating it, if someone serves me boar meat — not just in Bavaria, really, but anywhere in the world — I'ma have one reaction:
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