Gather round, gentle reader, for I have returned from the antipodean abyss with a tale so foul it would make a maggot wretch. The mouse plague ravaging New South Wales has transformed farmland into a scene from a necromancer’s fever dream. Decaying bodies, I am told. The stench of rot so profound it clings to the wheat. And what, pray, has this to do with the sceptered isle? Everything, you gin-soaked fool.
Let me paint you a picture. Picture a farmer in Dubbo, his tractor crunching over a carpet of dead and dying rodents. He is not harvesting crops. He is harvesting corpses. The mice, driven by some biblical madness, have chewed through wiring. They have poisoned grain silos with their filth. They have climbed into the mouths of sleeping dogs. And still the government dithers, dispensing bromides about baiting programs and biocontrol.
Now let us turn our gaze to the home counties. For we in Britain are not immune. We have our own lessons to learn, etched in the very marrow of our pest control manual. Remember the great rat infestation of 2015? The one that followed the floods? No, of course you don’t. You were too busy Instagramming your avocado toast. But I remember. I remember the council lorries heaving with poisoned corpses. I remember the screams from the Waitrose car park.
The Australian government is about to release a secret report, leaked to me by a man who shall remain nameless but smells faintly of rodenticide. The report concludes that their current methods are 'insufficient.' Hau! You don’t say. When you carpet-bomb an ecosystem with poison, you don’t solve a plague. You create super-mice. You create a generation of rodents that laugh at Brodifacoum.
And what of our own proud pest control empire? We have the finest exterminators in the world. Men who can dispatch a rat with a single flick of a terrier. But we have grown soft. We rely on Chinese-made traps and American chemicals. We have forgotten the old ways. The way of the ferret. The way of the barn owl.
So here is my prescription, and I offer it gratis. Stop fumigating. Start farming predators. Introduce a bounty on every mouse tail. Hire an army of urban fox-hunters. And for the love of God, stop feeding the pigeons.
This is not a mouse plague. This is a plague of idiocy. And it is spreading.
