Australia’s massive mouse plague footage will haunt your nightmares

Parts of Australia are struggling with a ‘plague’ of rodents.

Large rural areas of inland New South Wales and Queensland are overrun by millions of mice who have taken over agricultural land, homes, shops, hospitals and cars. They also eat everything in sight.

Reuters reported that the harvest of the bumper grain in the region led to the increase in rodents.

“You can imagine having mice with you every time you open a closet, every time you go to your pantry,” rodent expert Steve Henry told the wire service. “And they eat in your food containers, they fold your clean linen in your linen closet, they walk across your bed at night.”

They also leave haunting videos and images:

On one farm, the mice ate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hay bales and reduced them to heaps of dust within a few weeks.

“It’s a real step in the gut,” farmer Rowena Macrae of Coonamble told Queensland Country Life. “It’s very difficult to look at.”

“They stink whether they’re alive or dead, you can sometimes not escape the smell,” Pon Goldsmith of Coonamble, who trapped thousands of mice, told The Guardian Australia. “It’s oppressive, but we’re resilient.”

Lisa Gore of Toowoomba told the newspaper that her 12-year-old son had caught 183 in a single night.

“It’s the way she works at the moment,” she said. “He’s very proud of himself.”

Local reports said the mouse population was still growing and attempts to poison rodents began to decline as dead animals showed up in water tanks. One of the homeowners in Elong Elong, who is investigating the water barrier, received a ‘riotous’ smell, according to Australian ABC News.

“We always filter the water that goes into our house from the tanks, so personally we feel like we have covered our precautions so that we did not notice anything with the taste,” Louise Hennessy told the news agency. “But the smell of the mice at the top of the tank was so disgusting.”

Public health authorities are now warning about the possibility of bacteria in the water if dead mice remain in the tanks.

Authorities said a drop in temperature or heavy rainfall could wipe out most mice at any time.

.Source