Images of the massive plague of mice in Australia will haunt your nightmares

Parts of Australia are battling a rodent “plague”.

Large rural areas within New South Wales and Queensland are overtaken by millions of mice, which have taken over farmland, houses, shops, hospitals and cars. He also eats everything in plain sight.

Reuters reported that the grain harvest in the region has led to an increase in rodents.

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

It also leaves behind haunting videos and images:

On a farm, the mice ate hundreds of thousands of dollars of hay bales, reducing them to dust mounds in a matter of weeks.

“It’s a real racing blow,” Coonamble farmer Rowena Macrae told Queensland Country Life. “It’s very difficult to follow.”

“Puppets are alive or dead, sometimes you can’t get rid of the smell,” Pip Goldsmith of Coonamble, who caught thousands of mice, told The Guardian Australia. “It’s overwhelming, but we’re resilient.”

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 is very proud of himself.”

Local reports say the mouse population continues to grow and rodent poisoning efforts have begun to return as dead creatures return to water tanks. A homeowner in Elong Elong who was investigating a water block found an “outrageous” smell, according to ABC News in Australia.

“We always filter the water that enters our house from the tanks, so we personally feel that we have covered our precautions, so we didn’t notice anything with taste,” Louise Hennessy told the news agency. “But the smell of mice on top of the tank was so disgusting.”

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

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