Images of Australia’s massive mouse plague will haunt your nightmares

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

Large parts of the interior of New South Wales and Queensland are overrun by millions of mice, who have taken over farmland, homes, shops, hospitals and cars. They also eat everything they see.

Reuters reported that the region’s massive grain harvest led to the proliferation of rodents.

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

They also leave haunting videos and images:

At one farm, the mice ate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hay bales, reducing them to piles of dust within weeks.

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

“They stink, live or dead, sometimes you can’t escape the smell,” Pip Goldsmith of Coonamble, who has trapped thousands of mice, told The Guardian Australia. “It’s oppressive, but we are resilient.”

Toowoomba’s Lisa Gore told the newspaper that her 12-year-old son had captured 183 people in one night.

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

Local reports said the mouse population continues to grow and that attempts to poison the rodents backfire as dead bugs show up in water tanks. A homeowner in Elong Elong who investigated a water blockage came across a “disgusting” odor, according to ABC News in Australia.

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

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

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