After resisting drought and fire, thousands of Australians are battling a plague of rats and mice, and many hope that record torrential rains will drown them.
The rodents hit rural parts of New South Wales and Queensland after the regions had an abundant crop after years of drought, according to a report by the Guardian.
A grocer told the newspaper that he arrives five hours early to clean up his store, the 5Star supermarket, to discard between 400 and 500 rodents caught each night.
“We don’t want to come in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they are going to die and it is impossible to find all the bodies, ”said Naav Singh. “We have five or six cans every week full of groceries that we are throwing away.” He added that the mice even chewed plastic bottles of soft drinks.
Another woman from the town of Toowoomba, Queensland, told the Guardian that a friend recently removed the fabric from her armchair when she started to stink and found a nest of baby mice in the stuffing.
Mice on farms also wreaked havoc, chewing bales of hay and destroying machinery.
“Some farmers have lost up to 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 prevent them from entering our offices, our machines, our tractors, our trucks. They eat all the wiring. “
Authorities, who are afraid to spend thousands of dollars to deal with the plague, said they hope the heavy rains will wipe out mice and rats naturally.