Let’s just go through the catalogue of ways to die in Australia:
- dingoes which eat babies
- brown snakes
- funnel-web spiders
- sharks
- saltwater crocodiles
- Sydney traffic
- unchecked, uncontrollable bush fires
- box jellyfish
- blue-ringed octopus
- its cousin, the blue-lined octopus
- stonefish
- Australian paralysis tick
- and so many more
Now we can add mouse plagues to this list:
At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.
Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.
The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia´s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse.
And of course, plagues of mice sometimes result in follow-up plagues of… you guessed it, snakes, which treat this as some kind of Roman orgy of gluttony, and not only gorge themselves but create still more snakes to take advantage of the bounty.
Predictably, this mouse plague is being met with customary Aussie ingenuity and just as predictably, activities like this are being greeted with horror by the Usual Suspects (almost all of whom, of course, live in areas untouched by the mouse plague):
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on Tuesday pleaded with farmers not to kill ‘curious animals’ that are ‘just looking for food to survive’.
‘They shouldn’t be robbed of that right because of the dangerous notion of human supremacy,’ PETA spokeswoman Aleesha Naxakis said.
“Human supremacy”, eh? We should also drop this bunch of rodents into drowning pits and fire barrels.
As a lad, I used to enjoy hunting for mice in the fields nearby our house, armed with my trusty Diana air rifle, but I think my best day only yielded a dozen or so. This Oz thing is something else altogether.
Well, I imagine my wife just took a trip to Australia OFF her bucket list, she HATES mice.
The day we moved into our first house in NJ in 2001, the movers have just left and we were going about the usual post-move chores (which box is my tooth brush in?), one of our cats was staring intently under the radiator in the family room. I quipped that maybe there was a mouse under there, and my wife replied “We have to move!”. Fast forward maybe six or seven years, I’d gone to bed earlier than she did, she comes into the bedroom, wakes me up an announces “We have to move!” Seems the cats (including the one above) had cornered a mouse in the kitchen. I got up to do the needful, the mouse escaped and scurried under the refrigerator. Next day I bought traps and got him.
Mark D
One year in South Texas, we had a bad mouse season. Nothing like that video, but I remember seeing mice in the neighbor’s yard climb up the tree, hop to the power line, then scamper down the line and into our garage. In a relatively short time (less than an hour), I counted over 100 mice. My brothers and I were hell on wheels with our BB guns while my dad put out poison and traps. This went on for about a month or two and then just stopped. I never saw anything like that again. Not sure what kicked it off or why it never repeated. Maybe they just hit a critical mass (exponential birthrate explosion) and that’s that. IDK, but it was wild.
BB gun hell….Dillon needs to get on sizing up a m134 to 12 gauge (at least) for that shit.
.410 should be sufficient for mice.
This will be credited to GLOBALCLIMATECHANGE or Structural Racism.
I clicked on the link to the “Usual Suspects” and thought what an attention whore! Maybe one of the affected farmers could capture and deliver a thousand or so mice to her so she could take care of feeding and caring for them. What a world we now live in.
There was a big todo in Santa Barbara about their homeless (bums) problem.
Perhaps they need to just have them all “transported” to South Oz?
I think sweet, caring, [stupid], virtue-signalling Aleesha should put her money where her lantern-jawed mouth is and take ten thou or so into her pad and feed the voracious little dears. Then she can volunteer for a hanta virus study.
Bitch.
Well, hell, Kim, lets bring it home a bit………..
I live just a couple hours east of you, about 1.5mi from the Red River, and this year so far I’ve killed 4 water moccasins, and probably foolishly let one go thinking it was a rat snake but looking at the picture later, I think I was wrong – and this F’er was 5′ long. I killed 4 my first summer here, one of which was 5′ long and on my front porch – the situation surrounding the killing of this one is a story unto itself, involving weird .45 ballistics that would make the JFK assassination’s ‘magic bullet’ sit and go ‘ooooooh’ at my 230 grains of magic weird shit……….. But as I say, different story.
This year, I noticed something and after reading an article (somewhere) realized I wasn’t just making it up: the ticks are crazy bad this year.
We adopted 3 young pups to act as farm dogs, finding them making do on an abandoned property up the road, and they’re lovely, but were covered in ticks. Dog ticks, deer ticks, just horrible. We flea bathed them, treated them with that shit that goes between the shoulderblades that kills ticks, fleas, mosquitos (heartworm vector – man, you don’t want your dogs getting that) then a week later, the oral medication. So, they go running through the hay meadow – uncut so far because of rain enough to make me consider Ark building as a growth industry – and come back with a metric fuckton of ticks on them, but not attached. Now I’m seeing Lone Star ticks, and I said alllll that to say this:
We do not want to get bitten by these guys. Yeah, Lyme disease is bad, but Lone Star Ticks can give you alpha-gam allergy, which makes you allergic to red meat.
How fucked up is that, a disease that turns you into a vegetarian! What’s next, a mosquito borne vector disease making us homos, or water borne illness causing an uncontrollable desire to vote commie?
(shudder)
Best to just get bitten in the carotid artery by the cottonmouth, if you ask me…….
Cheers from the Piney Woods
Dave
You and yours need to get to Dallas again sometime. I miss those stories.
At least it’s fixed their plague of elephants.
“…the dangerous notion of human supremacy…”
That’s a good one, thanks for the laugh! Chickens fear me, for I have eaten many of their kind. Swine feel much the same way; pork belly char siu on the menu tonight.
Circa 1971 while in a post-doc on occasion I would have lunch with an Australian post-doc. I remember our first conversation. He began with a question: ” Can you list the ten most venomous snakes in the world?” I sat back and replied: “Whaat?” He smiled and said: “Nine of those ten are found in Australia.” I can’t recall his name now but I remember his stories of the murdering beasts in and around that continent of Australia.
Dan Kurt
Just out of curiosity, what terrors that can kill you exist in Seffrica, aside from the obvious two legged kind?
Uruguay had a surfeit of spiders, black widow, brown recluse, and a local variant called “pollito” that was very small, had red dots over the thorax and is bloody deadly. That and the usual rattlesnakes and a couple of others in the north including black scorpions, not so much in the city (plenty of spiders) though we did deal with Portugues Man’o war and sharks on the Atlantic coast.
Have explored Oz a number of times, including visits to the bush and did not encounter much more than what you normally expect to see. Granted I have not made it to the northern end around Darwin which is probably where most of the nastiest live.