It sounds like one of those Inoshiro Honda-directed Toho Studio epics from the 1950s, but it’s a for-real story. The evacuated city of Fukushima is now overrun by Wild Boars that have been eating radioactive plants and stuff, and this have a body burden of 300 times the safe level of Cesium-137 (for instance). They haven’t suffered any ill effects, apparently (yet). And they haven’t grown to enormous size and developed heat breath.
It’s still a serious problem, and in one way it’s related to that ur-1950s monster film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. You see, they’re killing the boars, but they need a way to dispose of the bodies. They’re too radioactive to eat, and there’s only so much space to bury them. And they can’t burn them – that just aerosolizes the radioactive chemicals.
It’s the same problem they had in TBf20kF, except in that case it wasn’t radioactivity – the titular Beast was infected with a disease spread by blood. Soldiers were dropping from catching the disease if the got near pools of the Beast’s blood, so they couldn’t just blow the thing up or shoot it to pieces without spreading the infection in the form of blood droplets all over new York City (the cleverest reason I ever encountered in a Monster Film for not being able to simply blow the damned thing up, or shoot it).
In that movie, they solved the problem by shooting the Beasty with a radioactive “bullet” that both killed the Beast and its germs, a neat solution that brought full circle the menace, since it was radioactivity, in the form of an atomic bomb test, that awakened the Beast in the first place.
That won’t work with the Radioactive Boars of Fukushima.
Radioactivity doesn’t guarantee death from something like cancer, but it does increase the chances of it. The more radioactivity in your body the greater the odds of cancer. The longer it’s in your body the greater the odds of cancer.
People live longer than a lot of other animals, AND we eat at the top of the food chain. Therefore, we not only concentrate contaminants like radioactive isotopes, we can carry them around for decades, thus greatly increasing the chances of them causing illness.
On the flip side, not only do most other animal live far shorter lives, but a considerable number of these wild boars will die of accidents or various illnesses and injuries before the radioactivity in their bodies cause cancer. And sick animals in the wild, including those suffering from something like cancer, often wind up as lunch for something else before we humans can spot and count them.
So, sure - go live in a contaminated area. You should be just fine… for 10-20 years. And then you have relatively high odds of turning up with cancer. Meanwhile, the field mice have been through 20-40 generations (at least) with them living and dying and being eaten so fast they don’t have a chance to die of cancer.
This is one of the reasons they’ve tolerated old folks living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone - someone 70 years old is probably going to die of some other age-related problem before eating contaminated vegetables and the occasional deer or rabbit will kill them due to radiation load. Someone 20, though, would probably live long enough to acquire a nasty cancer or two if they lived there and at the local food.
