It’s the news that’s sent a thrill of horror, and a faint whiff of cheddar, through the corridors of Whitehall. Australia, that sun-blasted land of drop bears and runaway barbecues, is in the grip of a rodent revolution. A mouse plague, biblical in its scope and terrifying in its sheer, skittering numbers, is devouring the Outback’s grain reserves with the enthusiasm of a politician at a free buffet.
And what does Her Majesty’s Government do? They dispatch a delegation. A taskforce. Some ‘agricultural experts’ with clipboards, sensible shoes, and what can only be described as a breathtaking confidence in their own irrelevance.
Picture it, dear reader. The Australian farmer, weeping into a pile of mouse-gnawed wheat, his spirit broken by the endless, squeaking tide. And into this scene of rural apocalypse strides a man from Guildford with a pamphlet on ‘humane pest displacement’ and a PowerPoint presentation on the efficacy of ultrasonic repellents. It is like offering a drowning man a detailed treatise on the properties of water.
The sheer balls of the thing! The British, possessors of a climate that can only breed a mildly irritating fruit fly, presume to teach the Antipodeans about their vermin. This is the same nation that gave the world the grey squirrel, which promptly evicted the native red squirrel from its own home like a particularly ruthless landlord. Our track record in ‘pest control’ is to introduce a larger, more aggressive pest, and then call it a day.
And what, precisely, is the British solution? ‘Integrated Pest Management.’ A phrase so blithe, so clinical, it could have been concocted in a laboratory by men who have never felt a mouse run over their face in the dead of night. Do they think the Aussies haven’t tried the basics? The cats? The traps? The poison? The desperate, final resort of the backyard flamethrower? No, what the Englishman brings is the smug assurance of a man who has never seen a thousand mice pour out of a single hay bale like a boiling pot of oatmeal.
The reality, the grim, infested truth, is that Australia’s mouse plague is a product of its own lunatic weather patterns. A perfect storm of drought, then rain, then a grain glut. The mice have simply done what any sensible creature would do: they bred like... well, like mice. And now they swarm over the land, a living carpet of teeth and tails, costing farmers millions, driving families from their homes, and giving the phrase ‘sleep tight’ a whole new existential dread.
But rest assured, chaps, the Brits are on the case. Expect a report in six months, printed on high-quality paper, concluding that the problem requires ‘further study’ and a ‘multi-stakeholder approach.’ Meanwhile, the mice will have probably unionised, demanded better working conditions, and opened a chain of mini-casinos in the wheat silos.
One cannot help but picture the scene at Heathrow as this brave team departs. A round of firm handshakes, a last sip of terrible airport gin, and a muttered prayer that their expertise is not met with the full, ferocious force of Australian sarcasm. ‘Thanks, mate. We’ll just set the cats on them. Oh, you brought a spreadsheet? Righto.’
The very concept of a foreign power intervening in a mouse plague is so exquisitely, so classically human. It is the same impulse that makes us believe we can legislate away an earthquake or manage a hurricane via committee. The mice, of course, will not read the report. They will not attend the workshop. They will simply carry on, eating and breeding, which is more than one can say for the average British quango.
In the end, the only effective pest control for a mouse plague is a long, hard winter or a plague of cats. But since we cannot export rain, and the cats are quite happy where they are, we export our finest bureaucrats instead. God save the mice. They’re in for a very boring invasion.
