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Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

theguardian.com

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Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#121

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

danieltillett wrote: post #116

Something I have always found insane is all the regulations and paperwork hurdles around killing mice in labs. Want to kill 10 mice humanely in a lab then you need to fill out a 60 page report, send it off to an ethics committee for their opinion, and then wait 3 months. Want to kill a few hundred million mice in the wild with a poison that will result is a slow and painful death - go for it.

Eh as a PhD student in genetics, the stuff we do to mice is abominable. Researchers give them incurable insufferable cancers to study complex gene interactions. In my first lab, there were even signs on the mouse cages instructing the veterinarians not to administer eye drops even though the eyes were bulging out of their head. These mice are set up for a lifetime of suffering sometimes.

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#122

Post by goldenkey »

dehrmann wrote: post #92
djrogers wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats are incredibly efficient hunters. I’d venture that 1-2 per household would quickly make a huge difference in the population, although a good number of those would have to be outdoor / barn / feral cats to have along term effect. Disneyland has roughly 400 cats that keep the park largely rodent free, which is a minor miracle given the amount of food there is there.

> largely rodent free Oh, the irony.

Mickey Mouse begs to differ :-)

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#123

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

stretchwithme wrote: post #109
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visited Athens, the massive colonies of feral cats were very notable. They could take over parks. American culture is specifically oriented toward preventing this kind of thing from happening. A feral cat is judged to be in need of a home. And there is a very widespread popular effort to say that you are doing something immoral if you don't spay your cat -- if a fertile cat did go feral, it might have children…

Some of those folks say they believe in animal rights too. Keeping someone captive and ending their ability to reproduce seems more like abuse than love.

An animal rights activist is also going to take into account the quality of life of birds and other animals that cats slaughter by the billions.

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#124

Post by stubish »

vidanay wrote: post #19

What's the root cause? Not enough birds of prey?

The birds of prey don't seem to like living near people. Rabbits are plentiful and food for foxes, mice hit plague proportions in farming communities, but the eagle, hawk, falcon and owl numbers don't seem to increase to match. Other birds not so much, where we have an order of magnitude more smaller birds in our garden compared to the nearby bush land (both native and introduced).

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#125

Post by ackbar03 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #94
clairity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The way they do it is the dog grabs the rat in it's mouth and shakes its head wildly." my dog is a terrier/spitz mix and shows this behavior in play (from the terrier side, the spitz side just makes her pretty =). she'll grab a stick or other small item and shake it wildly while bucking about. most people think it's hilarious until i tell them why she does it. =D

My dog is similar and caught a rat once in the garden. Ever heard a rat scream ? I ran around the corner to see what the commotion was and he had it in his jaws shaking his head violently. Snapped the rats back, then dropped it and walked away. I put the rat out of its misery with a spade then buried it. Talk about adrenaline! But yeah rats scream like a little girl screams. It’s fucking horrifying.

Your adrenaline or the dogs?

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#126

Post by lsllc »

war1025 wrote: post #61
quesera wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another theory re: Lyme disease is that the reforestation of old farmlands supports a higher deer population. Deer (or other large hosts: bear, moose, etc) are an essential part of the deer tick lifecycle, which in turn supports the spread of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. New England has more forest area today than it has since the 1700s.

I have a coworker that recently moved from near Boston to southern Massachusetts. Absolutely boggles my mind the amount of wildlife he comes across. I thought the East coast was basically fully urbanized.

Living in MA, inside Rt 128 in a fairly urban city; there are foxes in my neighborhood nightly (as seen on my Ring doorbell), Deer and Coyotes in the woods. It's a pretty wild place for 5 miles outside a major east coast city.

In the metro area, we've also have bears and even a "moose on the loose":

https://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/05/16/bear-in-newton-massac...

https://www.boston.com/news/animals/2016/06/01/moose-on-the-...

Not to mention a mountain lion:

https://patch.com/massachusetts/winchester/winchester-mounta...

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#127

Post by Jedd »

seunosewa wrote: post #8

As an African, my first thought on seeing the pictures was that it’s a shame that the dead mice (that were caught in traps or by dogs) aren’t being used to make pet food or to feed zoo animals after cooking them thoroughly in large pots.

Evidently contemporary baits aren't Warfarin based - that was the active ingredient I recall when growing up - it acts as a blood thinner, and rodents would haemorrhage internally whenever they bumped into something. A fairly unpleasant death.

I'm not sure on the current commercial baits ingredients, but in any case, a good number of the rodents you're seeing in those photos will have been poisoned rather than trapped & drowned, so you definitely don't want your pets eating them.

Having said that, a neighbour told me recently his dog had eaten some baits -- it was a bit slow for a few days, and 'shat green for a week', but seemed to weather it okay.

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#128

Post by Jedd »

underseacables wrote: post #29

This is going to sound silly but I’m absolutely serious: where are the cats?

Cats are not ideal - they destroy native wildlife, and carry disease. Preferable (natives) would be snakes and raptors.

But the problem in any of those cases are the rate of population change. As per TFA, mice are fertile at 6 weeks old. What they don't mention is that their gestation period is 3 weeks, females give birth to up to a dozen pups, and can mate immediately after birth.

So in perfectly suited environments like we have here in Australia now, you're looking at a potential order of magnitude growth every 3-4 weeks.

Cats, snakes, raptors, etc have a near-flat population growth, regardless of the amount of additional food around for them.

Re: Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

#129

Post by perl4ever »

coldcode wrote: post #4
joncrane wrote: post #2

When I read that article, all I could think of was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Pyu-Cj0gg (In case you're sensitive, it's farmers using pitchforks to turn soil in a fallow or recently harvested field that is ridden with rats, which flushes the rats. There are a handful of ratting dogs milling about which immediately chase and kill the rats. The way they do it is the dog grabs the rat in it's mouth an…

I wonder how many cats every house needs to rid it of mice. Given the volume, I doubt there are enough cats in Australia to even make a dent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_in_Australia

"Feral cats are one of the major invasive species in Australia"

"In 2016, 29% of Australian households had a domesticated cat"

"Cats in Australia have no natural predators except dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles, and as a result, they are apex predators where neither the dingo nor the eagle exists"

Based on the given figure of 2 million or more feral cats in Australia, each killing 740 wild animals a year, that's 1.5 billion total.

So, given all that, I wonder why the mice are a problem at the moment.

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