Australia’s Massive Mouse Plague Is Right Out of a Horror Movie
Parts of Australia are battling a new “plague” of terrifying mice.
Large rural areas of inland New South Wales and Queensland are being overrun by millions of mice. They have taken over farmland, homes, stores, hospitals, and even cars. They are also eating everything in their path.
According to Reuters, the bumper grain crop in the region is what led to the spike in rodents.
“You can imagine that every time you open a cupboard, every time you go to your pantry, there are mice present,” Steve Henry, a rodent expert, said. “And they’re eating into your food containers, they’re fouling your clean linen in your linen cupboard, they’re running across your bed at night.”
At one farm, the giant mice chewed through hundreds of thousands of dollars of hay bales. All that was left was mounds of dust.
“It’s a real kick in the guts,” farmer Rowena Macrae of Coonamble told Queensland Country Life. “It’s so very hard to watch.”
“They stink whether they are alive or dead, you can’t escape the smell sometimes,” Pip Goldsmith of Coonamble, who has caught thousands of the mice, told The Guardian Australia. “It’s oppressive, but we are resilient.”
Lisa Gore of Toowoomba told the newspaper that her 12-year-old son caught 183 mice in a single night.
“It’s like his job at the moment,” she said. “He is very proud of himself.”
According to local reports, the mouse population continues to grow and efforts to poison the rodents have started to backfire as dead mice are turning up in water tanks, contaminating the water supply.
Public health authorities are now warning of the potential for bacteria in the water if dead mice are in the tanks.
Authorities said that a drop in temperature or a heavy rainfall could wipe out most of the mice at any time.
Oh my God, that’s disgusting, I’m glad I don’t live there. I really feel for the residents.
Too bad they aren’t allowed firearms. They could have shot some before the numbers got out of hand.
I don’t think firearms are the solution. I lived in a house where there were hundreds of mice living inside the walls. I devised a trap I called Walk The Plank. Basically a bucket half full of water and covered with a large page from a newspaper with an X cut into the middle. Next a 2 by 4 leading from the floor and to the edge of the bucket. Last but not least a generous sprinkling of grated cheese up along the plank and leading to the newspaper page. The first morning saw 34 drowned mice floating in the bucket. On average I wiped out about 50 mice a night. After a month I could finally sleep peacefully without the clatter of thousands of mice running inside the wall.