You can’t beat mouse plagues with poison drone strikes!

There is a mouse plague in Australia. It’s costing some farmers $200,000 – $300,000 in lost crops and the numbers are so great, they are even getting into hospitals and biting patients. But, you Australia mouse plagues and poison remedies don’t work.

The Guardian asks “are poison-packed drones the answer?”

No!

And … seriously?

The Guardian goes on to say: “Roger Woods, a Queensland farmer who had flown Black Hawk helicopters for 20 years, told Guardian Australia earlier this month that the NSW Environment Protection Authority had approved him to conduct the drone strikes on farms that wanted them” and “Woods argued drones were “very accurate” and could be used at night, when mice were most active and birds were roosting and less likely to be accidentally poisoned”.

How can NSW Environment even suggest such solutions?

Mouse plagues are on a scale bigger than anything that can ever be addressed this way.

From giant large cooling fans on the Great Barrier Reef to coastal sea defences that are economically unviable [1], we massively over-estimate our ability to control things using technology. At the same time, we massively underestimate the sheer magnitude of control that nature-based systems provide as an alternative.

How on Earth are drones supposed to replace the work of thousands of birds of prey covering millions of hectares? And besides, the wildlife suppresses mice populations before they become a problem. Once it’s a plague, it’s way too late!

Meanwhile, indiscriminate poisoning will kill more of the predators that would naturally control mouse numbers. And it will be indiscriminate. There is no way to apply rodent poison to plagues in a “precise” way.

There is a whole book on Ecologically-based Rodent Management that was written because of “a common concern on the lack of progress in rodent pest management over the past 20 years in both developing countries and elsewhere. This has occurred despite the advent in the 1970s of sophisticated chemical rodenticides“. 

In other words, poisons don’t work! They never have and never will.

Conditions that prevent a plague, however, include:

• Aggregation of predators in habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More with high mouse numbers (e.g. irrigated crops) due to low abundance of mice in surrounding areas.

But it’s more than just that. We’re already talking about the destruction of entire biological systems through broad scale intensive farming when there has been little to no focus on building even edge-habitat. It’s exactly the same reason we have locust plagues. In a functioning natural system, predator populations are far higher than we ever see today. We have sterilised the land of things we need to maintain farmland ecological integrity.

It’s extremely worrying that NSW Environment are permitting the use of poison, based partly on verbal evidence of someone who says, it’ll be okay, because it’s precise and at night.

It definitely won’t work but it will definitely kill some protected animals and further affect the long-term integrity of surrounding farm ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More.

When will our government and farming community realise that the only way left to fix these problems, is to rebuild wildlife populations and ecosystem function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More? Any other approach makes things worse, delays the solution and wastes huge amounts of money and effort.

The situation is already very serious for the lives and livelihoods of rural communities but Australia is decades behind where it needs to be, in a basic understanding of nature-based solutions.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, a support package is now in place that the ABC says “will be the equivalent of napalming mice” (see spotlight, below). The poisoning sets the farming system up for an even greater problem next time. Yet again, the systemic issues of poisoning, trapping etc. are being resorted to, to fix the problems they’ve created. No matter how this is framed, it will only make things worse.

How do you solve the problem of mouse plagues?

The NSW government and farming community are about to make a mistake that could cost Australia’s landowners billions of dollars and risk the economy and food security. Loss of wildlife is the cause behind land degradation, loss of agricultural land value and yield. The relaxation of laws allowing the widespread and indiscriminate use of powerful poisons to address a mouse plague, will only worsen the rate of collapse and prolong any efforts for recovery. Reversing these processes, by allowing nature to restore systems, costs little, achieves rapid results and could secure Australia’s food security while delivering the equivalent of ten times the 2020 pandemic JobKeeper budget every year. Now is the opportunity for Australia’s farmers and landowners to reverse the continuing economic decline of rural areas, which is marginalising agriculture, jeopardising livelihoods, costing lives and causing the political abandonment of entire communities. It’s not going to be easy to change people’s minds but it’s a conversation that needs to be had, if we’re to avoid mistakes of the past and see a return to healthy and vibrant rural cultures.

Read more here.

Spotlight

Mouse plague support package will be the ‘equivalent of napalming mice’, NSW agriculture minister says. The NSW Government has announced $50 million in funding to tackle the ongoing mouse plague, days after two of the state’s most influential rural lobby groups labelled it an ‘economic and public health crisis’.

1. Morris, R., et al., Developing a nature-based coastal defence strategy for Australia. Australian Journal of Civil Engineering, 2019: p. 1-10.