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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."
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/badgers/
Invaders must die
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.
Badger badger badger badger. Leg bone! Leg bone! Ohhhhh, Grave!
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.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
When they start building their homes WITH human bones, we'll have more of a problem.
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.
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.