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

Oblig

[sgbett]

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/badgers/

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

[asliarun]

I totally agree. Only a human being faces the possibility of being badgered in both life and in death.

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

[sgbett]

We don't have states or highways, thus we do not have interstate highways. When I say 'some countries' that was for the benefit of the american audience, what I mean is 'not in america'.

Here is an interesting graphic btw. http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg

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

[Hylandr]

Good lord, so when I take over the Earth I am moving all of humanity to Africa and refurbishing the rest of the planet..

That is just an astounding perspective. Thank You!

- Dan.

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

[pthisis]

This graphic is kinda dishonest, though. It excludes most of European Russia (by itself already about 13% the size of Africa and bigger then India) from Europe.

It also omits Alaska from the overlay. Alaska is the size of Spain, France, Germany, and the UK combined.

Hawaii's left out as well, but that's a much, er, smaller problem.

Re:Burying Bodies

[Calydor]

"Here lies Dan.
He lived his life in the fast lane.
Now he rests next to it."

Re:Burying Bodies

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you signed up for their newslestter?

Re:Burying Bodies

[operagost]

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

Badger badger badger

[Anonymous Coward]

Badger badger badger badger. Leg bone! Leg bone! Ohhhhh, Grave!

Am I strange?

[Chrisq]

Am I strange? I quite like the idea oif my remains being eaten by badgers. Its part of the circle of life. I have always thought that the Native American tree burials and Zoroastrian towers of silence are somehow very satisfying and symbolic of our return to nature.

Re:Am I strange?

[mpoulton]

Am I strange? I quite like the idea oif my remains being eaten by badgers. Its part of the circle of life. I have always thought that the Native American tree burials and Zoroastrian towers of silence are somehow very satisfying and symbolic of our return to nature.

Well, the badgers aren't so much eating your body as food. Really they're just pulling your remains out of the way of their excavation project. Rather than participating in the circle of life by providing nutrition to critters, your body is just annoying them by getting in the way of their homebuilding.

Re:Am I strange?

[CarpetShark]

When they start building their homes WITH human bones, we'll have more of a problem.

Re:Am I strange?

[bored_engineer]

Ya know: "native American" is not exactly a monolithic group. Being a descendant of north American aboriginal people, I just decided that I'm allowed to be offended for the entire group called "native American" when the label is misused. Not everybody who was here before the arrival of Europeans practiced "tree burials," so perhaps you ought to be more specific. Sioux tree burials? Nez Perce tree burials? Apache tree burials? Even this list isn't all-inclusive of the methods used in north America (pre-invasion) to bury the dead. [smaller nit to pick: that should really be native American, no Native American, just as it should be western European, not Western European. It's not necessary to capitalize every adjective.]

I'm sorry if the above paragraph is offensive; I don't mean to be. I do, though, dislike general assumptions or statements about aboriginal American peoples. We weren't (and are not) a monolithic culture.

Re:Am I strange?

[sznupi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Chapel_in_Czermna

Badgers?

[pablo_max]

We don't need no stinking...ah forget it.

Re:Vigilantism

[rpjs]

Uh this is England. Shooting people, other than Brazilian electricians and tooled-up lawyers, is rather frowned upon here.

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

[teh kurisu]

I like the idea that you think a church in a tiny village in rural England a) has security, and b) has armed security.

Well...

[Syberz]

It looks like nobody told the animals to...

*puts on sunglasses* ...stop badgering the corpses.

YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Bozons?

[boojum.cat]

The field next to St Remigius Church is said to contain remains of the main residence of the Bozon family, Lords of the manor from 1304 to 1539.

The badgers are just trying to enforce quantum mechanics. The remains are Bozons, and belong all in one grave. If they were Fermions, they'd belong in separate ground states.