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Snortical warfare: Wild boar launches amphibious assault against German beachgoers

Stealing nudists' laptops? An appetite for cocaine? They're evolving!

Video Footage from northern Germany appears to document an alarming development in the arsenal of wild boars – amphibious assaults.

The clip, captured at the seaside resort of Schönberg in Schleswig-Holstein on Germany's Baltic Sea coastline, is redolent of a scene from Jaws, except where you would expect to see the menacing black fin cutting through the water there were instead two twitching ears and a snout.

Sun-worshippers were quick to raise the alarm. A voice started yelling what we're going to guess is "GET OUT OF THE WATER!" – or is it "GET TO THE CHOPPER"? GCSE German skills have eluded us.

Youtube Video

As soon as the porcine of interest made landfall, it charged the closest bloke who happened to be wielding a shovel. A swift thwack to the flank and the boar tore off through the layers of picnic blankets and parasols, presumably to wallow in self-pity, while onlookers were left scratching their heads as to where the beast even came from.

In fact, die Wildschweine seem to be causing our Teuton friends a spot of bother across the country this summer. Last week, a portly nudist was photographed by one Adele Landauer at Teufelssee lake in west Berlin chasing after one that had stolen his laptop.

The most disturbing aspect of this story was that people are allowed to go around in the buff – "a popular and perfectly legal practice in the German capital as part of what is known as FKK, or Freikörperkultur (free body culture)," as The Guardian put it.

Whereas here in the UK, we quite prefer to keep folks' dangly bits and corpulent bodies shut out of sight in designated nudie colonies.

Landauer returned to the lake this week and was able to snap the same sow with her babies "totally peaceful in the middle of the crowd," she wrote.

Blighty has wild boar too. Though exterminated from the isles in the Middle Ages, they were imported from Europe in the 1980s for meat farming. Some animals escaped or were illegally released, however, and soon re-established several breeding populations in Kent, East Sussex, Dorset, Devon, and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire into Monmouthshire, Wales.

They are normally timid but fiercely protective of their young, and are loathed across the Continent for destroying crops and farm property. Advice from the Woodland Trust has been: "If you encounter a wild boar, the best advice is to move away slowly in the opposite direction."

Or whack it with a shovel, of course. Indeed, the development of amphibious combat among Germany's population is worrying given that the creatures also have a penchant for nose candy – as drug dealers in Italy discovered when they found their €20,000 stash of cocaine rooted and snuffled by wild boar in Tuscan woodland.

It almost makes you sympathise with the American man who defended ownership of assault rifles by asking: "How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?" ®

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