Meet the Other White Meat

Stahnsdorf Cemetery has pigs. Davis Cemetery has turkeys.

Turkeys don't pose a threat to humans, but they can be intimidating. If a person runs from one of the toms, the aggressive males will give chase, [Susan] Finkleman said. She's learned to sidle by the turkeys and avoid making eye contact with them.

But even if the turkeys never actually attack, their presence at the cemetery is untenable.

“Out of their own fear of the turkeys, someone could take a step backward and fall over a headstone and get hurt,” Finkleman said. [Link]

KCRA reporter Richard Sharp tried to get the other side of the story, but was rebuffed:

I've Never Been Boared at a Cemetery

A large cemetery south of Berlin has been overrun by wild boar.

Stahnsdorf cemetery has 120,000 graves, including some famous personalities including Werner von Siemens, the founder of the Siemens industrial group, and the artist Heinrich Zille.

The marauding boar didn't dig deep enough to uncover coffins, but they did ruin an area of 1,070 German wartime graves containing civilian victims of bombing raids and soldiers, said Ihlefeldt. They left a fenced-off section of British and Italian war graves untouched, however. [Link]

Advice for family historians planning a trip to Germany: When running from the wild pigs, be careful not to trip over the Nazi raccoons.

Cemetery Scavengers Not Welcome

Should you visit Graceland Cemetery in Mayville, Wisconsin, try to ignore the vultures and periodic explosions.

Ralph Smith, president of the Graceland Cemetery Association and head caretaker, said he has occasionally seen two or three pairs of turkey vultures nesting in the graveyard that dates back to the 1850s, but there are now about 60 of the birds on the ground, on headstones and in the trees.

Police are warning residents that an officer will fire bird bangers and screamer sirens twice a day to scare away turkey vultures that are roosting there. [Link]

[Yet again, thanks to Nancy!]

Porcupines Seek to Undermine Culture

From BBC News- World Edition of Aug. 18, 2005:

Porcupines raise thorny questions in Kenya

Porcupines are wreaking havoc with Kenyan farmers' crops and upsetting the ancestors, but not everyone is complaining.

Residents of Kenya's central Kiambu district are calling on the government and the Kenya Wildlife Service to do more to contain the invasion by the porcupines, or "nungunungu" as they are called in Swahili.

[snip]

They have started burrowing in local graveyards and as they dig holes to live in, they are also exhuming human remains, causing great distress.

"The porcupines are against our culture - once someone dies we just want them to rest peacefully," one man said.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]