Many Mice, Not So Many Traps

“Excuse me,” a NSW Central Coast Coles shopper asked a staff member yesterday. “Can you tell me where the mousetraps are?”

Those Nyngan/Dubbo mice are enormous

“Well, I can tell you where they should be,” the staffer replied. “They’re sold out.”

Shoppers across the state and around Australia are hearing the same thing, over and over again.

“Canberra daughter says the world has gone mad,” retired News Corp columnist Terry Sweetman reported on Thursday. “This time last year she couldn't buy facemasks or toilet paper. Now it's mousetraps.”

Greg Johnstone recently drove more than 400 kilometres to Sydney from his 40-acre Tamworth property in search of traps and baits.

“I got two tablets of poison, a huge win – but it’s only enough for two weeks,” he told website Eternity News.

He’s presently emptying the 30 traps in his garage three times a day. 

The mouse plague that began in regional Queensland and NSW is now hitting areas as far south as Tasmania and Geelong, Victoria.

“We’re getting smashed with calls,” Geelong Pest Control operations manager Mitch Bogard told his local paper.

And, of course, Geelong’s stores are out of traps.

The shortage is causing many Australians to seek online instructions for building their own mouse-catching devices.

One popular design involves a water bucket, a wooden ramp and a peanut butter-smeared can suspended above the bucket by wire.

A major advantage of this design is that it can trap and drown hundreds of mice at a time.

A disadvantage may be the subsequent need to deal with those hundreds of dead, soggy rodents.

Back on the Central Coast, our prospective trap purchaser next phoned Bunnings in West Gosford – one of the largest such outlets in NSW.

“Boxes of traps came in this morning,” a sales assistant told her. Then he took a look around the warehouse.

“They’re all gone.”

Her next call was to a local animal shelter. Let’s hope there isn’t a shortage of cats.