Badgers Digging Up Ancient Human Remains

One of England's oldest graveyards is under siege by badgers. Rev Simon Shouler now regularly patrols the grounds of St. Remigius Church looking for bones that the badgers have dug up. The badger is a protected species in England so they can not be killed, and attempts to have them relocated have been blocked by English Nature. From the article: "At least four graves have been disturbed so far; in one instance a child found a leg bone and took it home to his parents. ... Rev. Simon Shouler has been forced to carry out regular patrols to pick up stray bones, store them and re-inter them all in a new grave."

Comments

Burying Bodies

[DirtyCanuck]

Is it me or is the tradition of being buried becoming more and more ridiculous the further we venture into the reality that is the future.

Frankly cremation is the current preference, that doesn't end in a badger exhumation.

Re:Burying Bodies

[Clueless Nick]

Donate eyes, liver, kidneys or whichever organs can survive 'death', and cremate the remainder. There will only be a finite number of corpses that medical research can accept.

On the other hand, if we cease to exist when we die, how can we decide what to do with the corpse after death? It should be left to the family members or community or government to decide how to recycle or treat the waste.

Next up: flamewars about inheritance and communism

Re:Burying Bodies

[lenawash]

and the living won't be pestered with all those stupid zombie movies anymore.
cremation = no zombie.

Re:Burying Bodies

[tygerstripes]

So rather than donate you body to science, you can donate it to de Beers :-)

Re:Burying Bodies

[sgbett]

Because you can't build on the land for several hundred, if not thousands of years. In some countries that's a problem.

Re:Burying Bodies

[sznupi]

Burning wastes resources... and for what? (well, in many places burying does, too - seriously, concrete tombs and metal caskets?)

A solace for living participants that there will be some reflection about them; preferably in an orderly manner. That they will be remembered - but ultimately we ourselves don't treat very old memorials, very old customs, very old faiths as anything more than archeological curiosities.

PS. Also, Ig Nobel 2008:

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.
REFERENCE: "The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach," Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.

Re:Burying Bodies

[Hylandr]

All these interstate highways have at least 50 feet of available burial ground between the lanes and small critters often don't have much of a chance at making it over to invade.

Problem solved.

- Dan.

Re:Burying Bodies

[sznupi]

It's quite the other way around..."natural" burials scale exceedingly well. Number of people who have ever died is estimated at around 100 billion. Add to that countless other species in the time span of hundreds of millions of years, I don't think cremation of remains (not to mention industrial diamonds) is anywhere near scalable.

Re:Burying Bodies

[beelsebob]

Indeed, the issue is that we still have an emotional attachment to the remains, and care that a badger digs them up. Personally, if nature wants to find a way to use my body after I'm dead, I'm happy.

Re:Burying Bodies

[MrL0G1C]

A solace for living participants that there will be some reflection about them; preferably in an orderly manner. That they will be remembered

Having some stone stuck in the ground amongst 10,000 other stones stuck in the ground in no way means you are being remembered - seriously, does the stone look like you, does it talk, walk, think like you? - no, it's a hunk of rock with some random persons name on it wasting space.

And secondly - more natural: no it's not natural, natural would be to leave the body above ground to quickly be eaten by maggots etc.

Re:Burying Bodies

[fuzzix]

and the living won't be pestered with all those stupid zombie movies anymore.

cremation = no zombie.

Have you ever even seen a zombie movie?

Hint: Few feature the grave.

Re:Burying Bodies

[operagost]

Unfortunately, most areas have minimum requirements for disposing of remains and they aren't that cheap.

Re:Vigilantism

[pspahn]

Why do badgers have more rights than humans?

Because, unlike you (presumably), badgers are at somewhat of a disadvantage when it comes to the freedom to choose where they want to live.

Animals, in many cases, should have more rights than humans, especially endangered ones. If you don't like it, then stop fucking up their habitat.

Re:Vigilantism

[Nursie]

Why would human remains trump badgers?

Why should our emotional attachment to bit of dead folks mean that cute, furry, stripy badgers should be killed?

I don't think it's the twilight zone. The UK has already wiped out pretty much every wild animal it ever had that was larger than a badger. And we like badgers.

Re:Vigilantism

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Why do badgers have more rights than humans?

Because they never hire lawyers to exercise them.

Re:Vigilantism

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP is a fine example of why this sort of news story is coming about.

I'm quite a fan of the new government for the most part, but since they've come to power there's been an escalation of "news" stories about foxes attacking people, badgers causing problems etc. Call me cynical, but I find it strange that these sorts of stories have started to appear frequently at the same time as the government is making a push to bring back Fox hunting (no, not hunting as in America i.e. with guns- the sick fucked up version that only people with a disturbing psycopathic blood lust would enjoy) and to allow for badger culls by farmers.

I don't think any of this stuff is new, limited to badgers, or particularly newsworthy to be quite honest. I think it's just a case of needing something in the news about them to bolster the governments position on killing them so that irresponsible farmers who have destroyed their habitat pushing them into urban areas or into contact with their cattle in the first place can continue to be irresponsible, and can continue to grow fields of cabbages which they never harvest anyway because they grew too much, but want their government subsidy.