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Social distancing or chicken poop, your choice.

The Swedish city of Lund has quite the reputation around the world as the host of the annual Walpurgis Night celebration. The spring festival, usually held on the last night of April, attracts tens of thousands of revelers every year to celebrate an ancient pagan tradition. Unfortunately, what with the whole pandemic thing going on right now, a giant crowd of tens of thousands of people whooping it up is most definitely not a good idea. Since the Walpurgis Night celebration is classified as a “spontaneous” event, however, the city can’t outright ban people from attending. So, instead of bringing out the banhammer, Lund decided to opt for a more creative solution.

During the day, over a ton of chicken manure was dumped over the park’s various grassy surfaces. Chicken manure smells of phosphorus and nitrogen, a stink cocktail not unlike ammonia, which pretty much guaranteed that nobody would want to hang around longer than necessary, if at all.

Credit: Andreas Fink

Gustav Lundblad, chairman of the city council’s environmental committee, was pretty pleased with the strategy. “We get the opportunity to fertilize the lawns, and at the same time it will stink and so it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer in the park,” he told newspaper Sydsvenskan.

He did concede, however, that he wasn’t entirely sure if and how far the smell will spread into the city. “I am not a fertilizer expert, but as I understand it, it is clear that it might smell a bit outside the park as well,” Lundblad said. “These are chicken droppings, after all. I cannot guarantee that the rest of the city will be odorless. But the point is to keep people out of the city park.”