After enduring drought and fire, thousands of Australians are battling a plague of rats and mice, with many hoping they will all be drowned out by heavy record rains.
The rodents have settled in rural parts of New South Wales and Queensland after the regions experienced massive harvests after years of drought, according to a report in the Guardian.
A grocer told the paper that he arrived five hours early to clean his shop, 5Star supermarket, and pick up between 400 and 500 rodents caught every night.
“Sometimes we don’t want to go in in the morning. It stinks, they will die and it is impossible to find all the bodies, ”said Naav Singh. “Every week we fill five or six bins with groceries that we throw away.” He added that the mice even chewed through plastic soda bottles.
Another woman from the town of Toowoomba, Queensland, told the Guardian that a friend recently stripped the fabric from her armchair when it started to smell, and found a nest of baby mice in the stuffing.
Mice on farms have also wreaked havoc, chewing bales of hay and destroying machines.
“Some farmers have lost as much as 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 prevent them from entering our offices, our machines, our tractors, our trucks. They eat all the wiring. “
Officials, wary of spending thousands of dollars to deal with the plague, have said they hope heavy rains will wipe out the mice and rats naturally.