Radioactive boars, gathering whales can't be good

Oh, sure, you continue to whistle in the dark, pretending it's not the apocalypse. You can yell, "fake news!" You can bury your head in the sand.

I know better. I read the internet!

Call me an alarmist. Call me a fanatic. But please, don't call me to help when you face radioactive boars or huge gangs of aggressive humpback whales. Because they're out there. And they're coming.

Yes, they're coming. For us.

Radioactive boars? Sure. In Japan, where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down six years ago, we now have radioactive boars roaming the countryside, according to The New York Times.

According to the Times ("boaring, but never boring," should be its motto), boars are rampaging the countryside, sometimes attacking people. Japanese people like to eat boar meat, but these critters are too toxic to digest. Worse yet? As former residents of the nuked region prepare to move back after years of being kept away, boars have taken over their homes and have lost their fear of humans.

Because they're radioactive.

Read that last sentence again! The boars are radioactive.

Hunters have been set loose and have killed so many that they're running out of burial ground. For radioactive boars!

And there's still hundreds – or thousands – of them out there.

Bad news, right? Scary, right?

Well, that's not all. Consider another story that came out a couple of weeks ago: Humpback whales are congregating in large numbers off the coast of South Africa.

According to the Popular Science website (where presumably they talk about using soda bottles to make rockets and other "popular" things you can do with science), whales rarely even gather in groups of 10 to 20. Now groups of 200 are gathering off South Africa.

It's a whale-a-bration!

And here's what's worse: They're not supposed to be there. At the time of the report, the whales should have been gathering near Antarctica.

They're in huge groups. In a place where they normally don't gather.

Plotting. Waiting.

Scientists don't really have any good theories for why. Maybe it's food-related, although that's not likely. Maybe it's because the oceans are warming, but the ocean is warm near South Africa, too. Maybe they're like the entertainers who flocked to South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s for huge paychecks, ignoring the apartheid laws of the time.

It's a mystery.

But anyone who's watched science-fiction movies knows that animals are usually first to recognize the changes that lead to the eradication of humanity.

You can say you're not nervous. So can I. We can both say the presence of radioactive boars in Japan is nothing to be concerned about. We can dismiss the fact that humpback whales are gathering off the coast of South Africa in unheard of numbers. We can pretend that those things don't matter.

Here's all I know: Those are always harbingers of doom in movies and books about the apocalypse. Radioactive animals and unprecedented behavior is menacing.

I'll wait to really get worried, though, because I've watched enough scary movies.

The day I get worried is when all those things happen and a former game show host is the president of the United States.

Wait, what?

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.