In a development that has British agriculturists clutching their tweed jackets in scholarly fascination, Australia’s mouse plague has escalated into a full-blown rodent insurrection. Thousands of furry anarchists, having no respect for personal property or the sanctity of grain silos, are now laying waste to the Outback with the relentless efficiency of a German train timetable. Farmers in the UK, accustomed to griping about badgers and the occasional errant pheasant, are watching this apocalyptic vermin chorus with a mixture of horror and professional envy.
‘We thought we had it bad with slugs,’ said one Wiltshire barley baron, wiping a single tear from his ruddy cheek. ‘But this makes the Year of the Rat in Hong Kong look like a children’s tea party.’ The rodents, emboldened by a bumper harvest and the sheer incompetence of government pest control programmes, now number in the billions.
They scurry across roads like living carpets, chew through electrical wiring with the abandon of a London fox on bin day, and have developed a disturbing taste for expensive combine harvesters. The Australian government, in a moment of inspired genius, has approved the use of a particularly potent rodenticide that also happens to turn mice a shocking shade of neon yellow. This, they argue, makes the little blighters easier to spot.
Biff Thistlethwaite can only assume this is the same government that once gave us the ‘drop bears’ public safety campaign. Meanwhile, British farmers are studying the crisis with the detached curiosity of a BBC documentary crew. ‘We’re taking notes on what not to do,’ explained one agricultural college lecturer, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being mocked by his students.
‘Firstly, don’t let your grain storage become a rodent nightclub. Secondly, never underestimate the reproductive capabilities of a creature that can produce a litter of twelve every three weeks. This is nature’s way of telling us we’ve been too cocky about our place in the food chain.
’ The plague has also inspired a wave of creative solutions from the Australian populace, including a proposal to drop thousands of feral cats from helicopters (vetoed on health and safety grounds) and a scheme to train eagles to swoop down and carry off entire nests (the eagles promptly formed a union and demanded better working conditions). Biff cannot help but wonder if the true lesson for British farmers is not about pest control but about the folly of monoculture and the hubris of thinking we can outsmart evolution. As the mice multiply in their millions, one thing is clear: in the great game of farmer versus rodent, the scoreboard is currently reading Apocalypse 1, Human 0.
Perhaps it is time to consider a cultural exchange: send the Australian mice to Britain to teach our urban foxes a thing or two about coordinated anarchy. At the very least, the resulting chaos would be a welcome distraction from the price of milk.
