A severe mouse plague is overwhelming towns north-east of Perth, with residents describing roads covered in mice and infestations in homes and businesses.
Locals and farmers say current baits are ineffective and are calling for urgent approval to use stronger rodent poisons — a bureaucratic process that is dragging on.
The local MP says in the meantime, people are leaving town.
Unfortunately poisoning this many mice in such a wide area will undoubtedly lead to wider ecosystem casualties to creatures who feed on live mice and carion.
This can be mitigated by using poisons that break down while doing their job and are only effective at specific dosage to bodyweight such that they naturally dillute while killing mice, but since the mice will eat each other that also means they will build resistance to it very quickly.
The most ideal solution would be a mass sterilization, such as catching and spaying almost all the females, castrating the males, causing them to outcompete themselves for food and shrink dramatically in population.
Barring that, a better solution to poison is to trick them into falling into a container, this works well with buckets and then they can be sorted and disposed of later.
I don’t see how TNR is viable when a town is overrun with mice. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of “surgeries” on animals that have fleeting life spans. And these mice infestations are tens of millions of animals. I did hysterectomies on lab rats during college so I know that it’s not a very long process, but a rat is also 4x bigger than a mouse and it seems needlessly cruel to put an invasive pest animal through a traumatic surgery for essentially no gain.
For the females, it’s definitely fighting a flood with a bucket, but it’s better than doing nothing.
If you grab a bucket of males and a little hand tool that expands and retract to quickly rubber band their balls you could probably knock out up to 90 an hour on average if you spend 40s prepping a new band and strapping it on each mouse, but it’s less effective because only 1 male is enough to copulate with many females, but at least it robs food from viable males and females. This might be really optimistic though, theres a chance the mice could gnaw the band off. EDIT: a hot iron clamp would probably work better…
If you know of a more effective approach feel free to present it, but clearly the poison tactic isn’t going to work when they’ve already established themselves and reached this number.
There are at least 10 million mice in a farming town of a few thousand. More mice are being born a day than you could accomplish that way. You’re completely delusional if you think that is a viable plan.
The mice you castrate and spay will live longer than a day. They will consume resources for their entire lives and produce no offspring during that time. That’s why this works. The mice compete with each other for food and to a lesser extent shelter.
One person doing 90 and hour for 8 hours a day would castrate in 260 days (work days in a year) 187,200 mice. 53 people could do 10 Million Mice.
Mice reach sexual maturity at 5 weeks old and can have a litter of 10 mice once a month. You literally cannot TNR your way out of this. You either kill them with poison or they consume everything that is edible in the area and then starve to death. Those are the only options, and I reiterate that you are completely delusional.
If every mouse immediately fucked, gave birth, and died then that would be worrying, but the point I made 3 times already is that the mice consume finite resources which reduce dramatically via spay and neuter.