After enduring drought and fire, thousands of Australians are battling a plague of rats and mice, many hoping that record torrential rainfall will drown them all.
Rodents have landed in rural New South Wales and Queensland after the regions experienced a protective crop after years of drought, according to a report in The Guardian.
A grocer told the newspaper that he arrives five hours earlier to clean his store, the 5Star supermarket, to remove between 400 and 500 rodents caught each night.
“Sometimes we don’t want to go inside in the morning. It smells, they will die and it is impossible to find all the bodies “, said Naav Singh. “We have five or six bins every week, just filled with food we throw away.” He added that the mice even chewed through bottles of plastic soft drinks.
Another woman in Toowoomba, Queensland, told the Guardian that a friend recently stripped off the fabric of her chair when she began to stink and found a nest of mice in the stuffing.
Farm mice also wreaked havoc, chewing through bales of hay and destroying machinery.
“Some farmers have lost up to 2,500 bales,” said a local official. “There is not enough money for the council to do anything to help. All we can do is try to stop them from entering our offices, our machines, our tractors, our trucks. It eats all the cables. ”
Officials, who are cautious about spending thousands of dollars to deal with the plague, said they hope heavy rains will wipe out mice and rats naturally.