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.
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.