Boar Not Just Nasty, but Radioactive

Here's a weird twist on the boom in the wild boar population in Germany that has seen packs of the beasts rampaging down city streets and attacking people in parks: A bunch of them are radioactive. Believe it or not, they were contaminated by the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the Ukraine 25 years ago. And they're radioactive enough to make them unsafe to eat.

This is giving the German government fits because hunters who have been bagging them—650,000 of them last year, up from 287,000 the year before—can't sell them for consumption, so they qualify for compensation. The cost of making the hunters whole quadrupled to half a million dollars last year. Here's the best part: Why are boar so susceptible to radioactive contamination? Because they favor truffles and mushrooms, which are particularly efficient in absorbing it, Der Spiegel reports.
(More boar stories.)