'The smell is rotten': Australia's mice plague
Every morning before work for the last several months, Kodi Brady’s morning ritual has involved scooping up dead mice on his farm in Coonabarabran, Australia
as shown in graphic footage which will follow.
The livestock farmer has had to drown rodents in buckets, or set poison, as the biggest plague of the rodents in decades continues its sweep across the Australian state of New South Wales.
"The smell is rotten. The live smell of mice is terrible, but the dead smell's ten times worse and so I've been baiting... which I don't really like baiting because of the effects on the wildlife and that. I do live in a really nice area with lots of wildlife and that. But my morning ritual is to go out and I get a couple of hundred mice every night, I catch in buckets. The water bucket traps. I've got about 15 bait stations and I spend at least an hour every morning and every night picking up dead mice to reduce that risk of the wildlife getting hurt."
The region has been battling a mice plague for several months now, after heavy rains relieved the country's worst drought in 50 years.
The wet weather helped produce the country's largest ever grain crop - providing ample food to mice.
In May, New South Wales state offered farmers free bait to deal with the problem
but the size of the outbreak has led to calls on the government to allow the use of bromadiolone -- a toxic poison currently banned in Australia.
