Sweden hasn’t followed the method of dealing with the pandemic that most other countries have, opting to make its citizens take personal responsibility for following social distancing guidelines as opposed to making them follow newly established rules. But today is the traditional holiday, Walpurgis Night, so one city has covered its central park in chicken shit to deter visitors.
While planned gatherings of 50 people or more have been banned, spontaneous get-togethers aren’t subject to the same rule, so if everyone decides to congregate on a whim to eat, drink, and be merry, there’s not a lot anyone can do to stop it. Hence the chicken poop. The chairman of Lund council’s environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, said:
“Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April, [so] I think it was a good initiative. We get the opportunity to fertilise the lawns, and at the same time it will stink and so it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer in the park.
“I am not a fertiliser expert, but as I understand it, it is clear that it might smell a bit outside the park as well. These are chicken droppings, after all. I cannot guarantee that the rest of the city will be odourless. But the point is to keep people out of the city park.”
Lund is a university town, so students are often spotted in the parks and green spaces, which is likely to be going on in the run up to tonight’s festivities. Spraying crap everywhere seems like it’ll actually benefit the parks, and keep people out, and is a damn sight better than Spain’s genius idea to spray beaches with bleach. Philip Sandberg, who’s in charge of the city’s environmental committee, added:
“[It will] not be a pleasant experience “¦ to sit in a park that stinks of chicken manure. But it will be good for the lawns, as chicken manure contains a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen, so we’ll get a really nice park for the summer.”
We may see a few brave souls who’ll sit on the manure-saturated lawns anyway, drinking in the smell of shit as well as whatever booze they’ve brought with them. If coronavirus isn’t going to stop them, a bit of chicken poo certainly isn’t going to do much.
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.