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Morten Stricker / NTB via AP
Thousands of dead minks are buried at the Jydske Dragonregiment training ground in Noerre Felding near Holstebro in Denmark.
As if the Danish government’s hasty decision to euthanize and bury more than 10 million minks wasn’t a lurid enough story, thousands of bloated animal carcasses have begun to rise from shallow graves.
The phenomenon was reported by the Danish state broadcaster DR, after corpses were seen surfacing in a massive graveyard at a military training ground.
“It’s an extraordinary situation,” Thomas Kristensen, a press officer for the Danish National Police, responsible for the mink burials, told DR.
“In relation to decomposition, gases are formed that make everything expand a little and then, in the worst case, they are expelled from the ground.”
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The environment ministry, which regulates burials, said in a statement that the return of minks from the grave was a “temporary problem linked to the decomposition process of the animals.”
The mysterious resurgence of corpses has sparked a series of zombie jokes on Twitter. “2020, the year of the zombie mutant killer minks,” wrote online marketer Stefan Bogh-Andersen.
Denmark’s agriculture minister has already admitted that the graveyard where the re-emerging bodies were seen, outside the western Jutland town of Holstebro, was situated too close to a nearby lake.
The dead minks have been dug a meter into the ground and then covered with lime and a layer of soil, but according to Kristensen, the soil around Holstebro had turned out so sandy that more is needed to keep the carcasses down.
Mads Claus Rasmussen / AP
Denmark earlier this month announced plans to euthanize all of its minks in hopes of eliminating a vaccine-resistant Covid-19 mutation.
“One meter of soil is not just one meter of soil. It depends on what is done. That is why we have seen this happen, ”he said.
Denmark earlier this month announced plans to euthanize all of its minks in hopes of wiping out a vaccine-resistant Covid-19 mutation, which had developed on the country’s mink farms.
The slaughter decision has become a national scandal after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s government acknowledged that it had no legal right to order a slaughter of minks not contaminated by the Covid variant.
