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

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

Large rural portions of the interior of New South Wales and Queensland are being overtaken by millions of mice, who have seized farmland, homes, shops, hospitals and cars. They also eat everything in sight.

Reuters reported that the cultivation of bumper grain in the region caused 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 cabling service. “And they eat in your food containers, they soil your clean clothes in the closet of clothes, they run around your bed at night.”

They also leave disturbing videos and images behind:

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

“It’s a real kick,” Coonamble farmer Rowena Macrae told Queensland Country Life. “It’s very hard to see.”

“Sometimes they stink if they’re alive 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’re resilient.”

Lisa Gore, of Toowoomba, told the newspaper that her 12-year-old son caught 183 in one night.

“Right now it’s like their job,” he said. “He’s very proud of himself.”

Local reports said the mouse population continues to grow and that efforts to poison rodents had begun to skyrocket as dead critters appeared in water tanks. An Elong Elong owner investigating a water block found a “revolting” odor, according to ABC News, in Australia.

“We always filter the water coming into the house from the tanks, so we personally feel we’ve 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 of the potential for bacteria in the water if dead mice are kept in tanks.

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