Pictures of Australia’s horrible mouse plague bother your nightmares

Parts of Australia are battling a “plague” of rodents.

Millions of mice are traversing large rural parts of inland New South Wales and inland Queensland, which have taken over farmland, homes, stores, hospitals and cars. They also eat everything in sight.

Reuters reported a large grain crop in the area had caused an increase in rodents.

“You can imagine mice present every time you open a cupboard, every time you go to your pantry,” rodent expert Steve Henry told the wire service. “And they eat into your food containers, they get dirty clean linen in your cupboard, they run over your bed at night. ”

They also leave attractive videos and images:

At one farm, the mice would feed through hundreds of thousands of dollars of hay bales, reducing them to piles of dust in a few weeks.

“It’s a real kick in the juice,” Coonamble farmer Rowena Macrae told Queensland Country Life. “It’s so hard to watch. ”

“They claim to be alive or dead, you can’t escape the smell sometimes,” Pip Goldsmith of Coonamble, who has captured thousands of mice, told the Australian Guardian. “It’s oppressive, but we’re smart.”

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

“It’s like his job right now,” she said. “He’s very proud of himself.”

Local reports said the mouse population was growing and attempts to restart rodent poisoning as dead raiders turned up in water tanks. One homeowner in Elong Elong who was investigating a water barrier encountered a “revolting” smell, according to ABC News in Australia.

“We always filter the water into our house from the tanks so for us, personally, we feel we have covered our alert so that we didn’t notice anything with the taste, ”Louise Hennessy told the news agency. “But the smell of mice at the top of the tank was so embarrassing.”

Public health authorities are now warning of the potential for bacteria in the water if mice keep dead in the tanks.

Authorities said a drop in temperature or heavy rain could kill most of the mice at any time.