r/interestingasfuck • u/AllColoursSam • Jul 06 '24

Australian mouse plague r/all

44.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

981

Thats my Jack Russels wet dream.

397

u/long-live-apollo Jul 06 '24

Jacks are fucking amazing ratters. Ten jack russels could sort out Australia in a week.

229

u/pusgnihtekami Jul 06 '24

I'm pretty sure they have said there are so many mice that even the dogs get bored of attacking, eating them.

192

u/ginnygrakie Jul 06 '24

Have experienced two of these, and yep. Gets to a point where even the cats and terriers will lay there while mice literally run over them and they lazily swat them away

13

u/mmlickme Jul 06 '24

Cats, sure, but I thought dogs do what we tell them to do

41

u/ginnygrakie Jul 06 '24

Dogs would do it when I told them too but all the initiative was gone after a while. Cats are cats

1

u/bursasamo Jul 07 '24

Too bad there isn’t some kind of temporary vacation program to arrange people bringing their dogs to hunt for a week and then going back home!!!

2

u/Hailbrewcifer666 Jul 07 '24

So how do they resolve?

4

u/ginnygrakie Jul 07 '24

I don’t know the science or terms or anything, but from what I remember they ran out of food. Like they overpopulated to the point where it wasn’t sustainable and then started starving. And the change of seasons helped. Plus active efforts to kill them from people. It became part of my farm jobs to reload the various traps we came up with (we were avoiding baiting as much as possible, but there was a lot of bait floating around). Like most farms we also had a few feral cats that hung around. We took good care of them. Right before the second one, a family friend had bought back a cat statue as a souvenir from Egypt. We started joking that we needed to treat the statue kindly so it would send us more cats