TRAGIC LEGACY OF CHORNOBYL
Some German boars are radioactive
Twenty-eight years after the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, its effects are still being felt as far away as Germany — in the form of radioactive wild boars.
The animals still roam the forests of Germany, where they are hunted for their meat, which is sold as a delicacy. But recent tests by the state government of Saxony found more than one in three boars registers such high levels of radiation that it is unfit for human consumption.
Relations between the boars and German society are already mixed.
Outside the hunting community, wild boars are seen as a menace by many. Highways have to be closed when wild boars wander on to them, and they sometimes enter towns — in 2010 a herd attacked a man in a wheelchair in Berlin.
The issue of radioactive boars, however, is believed to be a legacy of the Chornobyl nuclear accident in 1986, when a reactor at a nuclear power plant in then Soviet-ruled Ukraine exploded, releasing a huge quantity of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
Wild boars are thought to be particularly affected because they root through the soil for food, and feed on mushrooms and underground truffles that store radiation. Many mushrooms from the affected areas are also believed to be unfit for human consumption.
Since 2012, it has been compulsory for hunters to have wild boars they kill in Saxony — 1,100 kilometres from Chornobyl — tested for radiation. Carcasses that exceed the safe limit of 600 becquerels per kilogram have to be destroyed. Now, in one year, 297 of 752 boar tested in Saxony have been over the limit, and there have been cases in Germany of boars testing dozens of times over the limit.
Many hunters sell the meat, and the German government is having to pay thousands of euros a year in compensation to hunters whose kills have to be destroyed.
“It doesn’t cover the loss from game sales, but at least it covers the cost of disposal,” Steffen Richter, head of the Saxon State Hunters Association, told Bild newspaper. The problem may not go away any time soon. Based on the tests, experts predict it could be around for another 50 years.