The story of a wild boar that nicked a sunbather’s laptop bag, forcing him to chase after the beast while stark bollock naked, understandably went viral.
Now, in classic internet style, the story has resurfaced with a twist that’ll make you hate humans.
Elsa the boar, who has two young piglets, is at risk of being put down because she’s got too confident around the hairless bipedal ape-descendants who think they own the earth (that’s us, btw).
Not only did the nude bather in Grunewald, Berlin, get his laptop back, Elsa didn’t even do any harm to it or its owner.
Nonetheless, the head of the Grunewald forestry office has said “This wild sow and her two young […] forage in broad daylight over the grass looking for food wherever there are bathers. They have lost all sense of shyness,” adding they’d have to be “withdrawn as a matter of priority.”
Withdrawn, if it wasn’t clear, means shot dead.
The German campaign group Action Fair Play immediately arranged a demonstration in support of Elsa and her piglets, and a petition to save her is approaching 10,000 signatures.
It blows our minds that anyone would think the solution to an overly-confident boar is to kill it and its babies, but apparently that’s the world we live in. Are there no in-betweens? Can she not go and live somewhere else in peace? In a zoo or wildlife enclosure, if need be? For fuck’s sake, humans, we’re not the be-all-and-end-all of planet earth.
The organisers of the pro-Elsa demonstration said in a statement:
“A few days ago pictures appeared in the media of a man in the nudist section of Teufelssee chasing a female wild boar which had run off with his laptop in a bag. These pictures delighted people around the world. Only the forestry office appeared to get no pleasure from them, deciding instead to shoot the sow and her young.
There has been absolutely no account taken for the fact that this sow has peacefully shared her living space with bathers for years. This wild boar has earned the right to live.”
If this story doesn’t have a happy ending, we’re setting the radioactive boars of Fukushima on the world. You have been warned. [The Guardian]