In the epic video game Fallout 4, you play a man (or woman) thrust into a post-apocalyptic nuclear landscape, one where he has to dodge radiation just as much as he has to dodge radioactive creatures that have been deformed by a nuclear blast. In 2011, Japan suffered its own nuclear fallout, when a power plant in Fukushima had a meltdown following an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The surrounding area is uninhabited by humans, but wild boars have been populating in the land affected by nuclear material, creating radioactive warpigs straight out of a horror movie, or in this case, a video game.
The Northern region of Japan is now home to thousands of radioactive boars, and local hunters have not been able to keep up with the demand of putting down the dangerous animals. “Unchecked” by humans since the Fukushima disaster, one estimate says that the boars have grown from 3,000 to over 13,000 in population. The boars have caused quite a ruckus, destroying local farms with an estimated $872,000 worth of damage.
In Nihonmatsu, a city 35 miles from the nuclear plant, mass graves for the corpses of the deceased pigs are popping up, but the graves are not being dug fast enough to keep up with the insane numbers of dead boars. As of this writing, there is no more public land available to bury the boars.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to have to ask local people to give us their land to use. The city doesn’t own land which isn’t occupied by houses,” a local hunter said.
Soma, a nearby city, has developed an incinerator to deal with the problem of the dead boars, but that facility can only incinerate three per day. Humans have not been adversely affected by the Fukushima meltdown, but the radioactive material in the area will make the land uninhabitable by people for another 30 years.
(Via the Independent)
