It was a big shot. A big hog. And a big disappointment. When
Georg van Bebber hauled back his wild boar from Ebersberg forest
near Munich after a day of hunting, he was exhilarated about his
impressive prey. But before he could take it home, a Geiger
counter showed a problem: The boar's meat was radioactive to an
extent considered potentially dangerous for consumption. It
needed to be thrown out and burnt. "I really would have liked to
have this boar," van Bebber said when he recounted the incident
in a telephone interview from Bavaria. Almost a quarter century
after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine, its
fallout is still a hot topic in some German regions, where
thousands of boars shot by hunters still turn up with excessive
levels of radioactivity. In fact, the numbers are higher than
ever before. The total compensation the German government paid
last year for the discarded contaminated meat shot up to a
record sum of euro425,000 (about $558,000), from only about
euro25,000 ten years ago, accor