The mice are winning. The plague force of mus musculus is sweeping Eastern Australia, ravaging crops in scenes not seen since Moses took off for a long walk.
But it’s going to be all right. PETA has the answer: catch and release the small rodents to … Well, that’s not immediately clear. All I can say is best tuck your socks into your trousers. Maybe get a cat.
That was Tuesday and spokesperson for the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, Aleesha Naxakis was firmly in the mouse corner. “These bright, curious animals are just looking for food to survive.
“They shouldn’t be robbed of that right because of the dangerous notion of human supremacy.”
“In the meantime, we urge farmers and residents to avoid poisoning these animals,” Ms Naxakis said.
“This cruel killing method not only subjects innocent mice to unbearably painful deaths, but also poses the risk of spreading bacteria in water when mouse carcasses appear in water tanks.
“Instead, humane traps allow small animals to be caught gently and released unharmed.”
Presumably, Ms Naxakis took a look at some of the film from western New South Wales overnight where the plague is at its highest point with millions of scurrying rodents stripping everything in their path, and thought, “We’re going to need a bigger shoebox with holes punched in the top.”
After all, she was merely enunciating PETA policy on rodent infestation. Catch and release. Who can forget the rat catch and release program in Europe in the 14th Century? It was a tremendous time for rats. Took them right to the top of the food chain.
Today, PETA backtracked on the rehoming of millions of mice. Interviewed by Ben Fordham on 2GB on Wednesday morning, Ms Naxakis acknowledged there were some logistical problems in catching and releasing the mouse horde.
Setting hundreds of mouse traps has been tried and proven to fail if Warner Bros’ cartoons are anything to go by. I recall not only did the mouse, Gonzales evade capture but the cat, Sylvester suffered serious injury from the hundreds of traps going off on and around his person, including one across the jaw which he described as “Deshpicable.”
Still, PETA’s problem was not mice, mouses or meeces.
The real menace, she said, was the government.
“The government should have done something long ago,” she told Fordham.
“We at PETA are realists. We are not anti-farmer. There are better, more humane long-term solutions.”
Ah, the gummint. I knew it was them. It’s not entirely clear what that something is the gummint should have done. I can only imagine it involves tiny veterinary surgical equipment and prostatectomies for all male mice under general anaesthetic in dedicated mouse hospitals constructed across regional Australia. Or maybe just a standard vasectomy which can be reversed if a male mouse really wants to have children at some point in the future.
On Planet PETA, you might expect to see an earnest young woman sitting on a big comfy chair stroking a cockroach. But you’d be wrong. And worse, you’d be guilty of speciesism.
Speciesism is a philosophy which says that one species or other is subject to a higher standard of morality. Whereas your PETA folk say the way all species should be treated should exist under the same moral code. In other words, the cat staring dolefully at an empty food bowl has the same moral right to a feed as starving humans in the Horn of Africa. To be fair, this is just the way my cat likes it.
It can get messy. One mustn’t stereotype bears on their toileting arrangements. Is a dog inherently a good boy or does he become a good boy? Nature or nurture? And you can forget about a trip to Randwick or indeed Wentworth Park to have a flutter on a nag or a dishie because that is pure evil. The idea that an animal can be used for our amusement or entertainment is the very embodiment of speciesism and you will burn in hell in a pyre created by a white pointer shark and Hitler’s dog just for thinking about it.
It was animal liberationist footage that led to the announcement of a ban on greyhounds in NSW. Then Premier Mike Baird made the call in the furore after Four Corners screened greyhound trainers using live baits. The ban on the sport may have stayed in place. Greyhound racing is a niche activity after all. But then people started thinking of the intrinsic unfairness of a government taking other people’s livelihoods away with a stroke of a legislative pen. After that, people started thinking if people in government couldn’t regulate and supervise a sport like greyhound racing effectively, maybe they shouldn’t be in government at all. And Premier Baird sensibly backflipped.
What sort of world would we live in if PETA people were running the show?
It would be very different. There’d only be about 12 of us for a start and we’d be flat out ethically wiping the backsides of bears who, as we discussed earlier, can defecate wherever they bloody well feel like.
The PETA view of the world is a sort of inverse speciesism, anti-humanism if you like, where humans should be subject to different, lesser standards of morality than our animal friends. In the PETA world, visions of mass murder bring a collective shrug of the shoulders while the cat with the funny eye evokes tears, angst-riddled grief and finally a crowd-funding campaign for expensive corrective surgery.
The mouse plague causing so much damage and loss to farmers enjoying their best crops in years will eventually peter (PETA?) out and then shocking footage of mouse cruelty will emerge and the hand wringing will begin again.
Sleepwalking towards minority government
Anthony Albanese may have not yet decided when formal hostilities are to begin, but expectations of an earlier than scheduled election remain high. Any plans to serve the full-term until May were dashed by the RBA’s Michele Bullock this week.
Big business outspends union movement to oust Labor
Queensland’s mining and building sectors tipped an enormous $3.8m into third-party campaigns to defeat Steven Miles’s Labor at the recent state election, outspending the union movement by hundreds of thousands of dollars.