“Sooner or later, we’re going to have to ask local people to give us their land to use,” said Tsuneo Saito, a local hunter, as quoted by The Independent. “The city doesn’t own land which isn’t occupied by houses.”
At one time, boar meat was considered a delicacy in Japan, but that’s no longer possible due to the zone’s nuclear contamination.
Scientists from the Fukushima University Environmental Radioactivity Institute, told the Japanese Mainichi daily newspaper in March: “Wild boar along with raccoon have been taking advantage of the evacuation zone, entering vacant houses in areas damaged by the [disaster], and using them as breeding places or burrows.”
This isn’t anything new. In the years following Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the population elks, wolves, bears, and lynx increased without humans around.
“That wildlife started increasing when humans abandoned the area in 1986 is not earth-shattering news,” Tom Hinton, an expert who has studied the aftermath of Chernobyl, told the Washington Post.
“What’s surprising here was the life was able to increase even in an area that is among the most radioactively contaminated in the world.”
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