After enduring drought and fire, thousands of Australians are battling a plague of rats and mice, and many expect torrential rains to drown them all.
Rodents have descended on rural New South Wales and Queensland after the regions experienced impeccable cultivation after years of drought, according to a report published in The Guardian.
A supermarket told the newspaper that it arrives five hours earlier to clean its store, the 5Star supermarket, to remove between 400 and 500 rodents caught each night.
“Sometimes we don’t want to go in the morning. It stinks, they will die and it is impossible to find all the bodies, ”said Naav Singh. “We have five or six containers each week just full of groceries that we throw out.” He added that the mice have even chewed with bottles of refreshing plastic drink.
Another woman from the city of Toowoomba, Queensland, told The Guardian that a friend recently stripped the fabric of her chair when it began to stink and found a nest of mice in the stuffing.
Farm mice have also caused devastation, chewing hay bales and destroying machinery.
“Some farmers have lost up to 2,500 bullets,” a local official said. “There is not enough money for the council to do anything to help. All we can do is try to keep them from entering our offices, our machinery, our tractors and our trucks. They eat all the wiring.
Officials, who are wary of spending thousands of dollars to deal with the plague, have said they expect heavy rains to wipe out mice and rats naturally.