According to reports, Denmark carried out an unprecedented large-scale culling of mink last month to prevent the spread of the mutant new crown virus between animals and workers. At least 15 to 17 million farmed minks were killed. This seems to have caused a series of new problems.
On Thursday, the Danish Ministry of Food and Agriculture stated that 4,700 tons of mink (that is, the carcasses of approximately 1.5 million mink) have been lost. Minister Rasmus Prehn admitted that he did not know where these minks were processed or how they were processed.
The Danish government admitted that the mink mass graves may have polluted the country’s groundwater. The Danish Environmental Protection Agency stated that they had drilled and collected water samples at two locations where mink bodies were buried. Geus Claus Kjoller, the chief geologist of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, said that the surface groundwater may have been contaminated with the corpse fluid from the decaying mink. Environmental Protection Agency Director Per Schriver said: “The groundwater under the grave is in danger of being contaminated.” At the end of November, at a burial site at the Holstebro military training base in northwestern Denmark, there were only a few hundreds of them. The swollen animal carcasses were lying on the ground in a crowd, exuding the stench of rotting. However, local officials assured that it is entirely natural for the mink carcass to emerge from the ground again. Animal carcasses will produce gas during the decay process, causing the carcasses to swell slightly, and in the worst case, they will be pushed out of the ground. The authorities are now considering digging out the mink bodies from the pit and burying them deeper to avoid such incidents from happening again.
reported that in taking this unprecedented move, the Danish government insisted that the slaughter of mink and mink mass graves would not pose a threat to health or the environment.
