A woman in Australia was taken to the hospital last week after waking up to the horrifying sight of a mouse chewing on her eyeball, The Sun reports. This is just another incident for a country that has been overrun by mice for more than half a year, an occurrence that the state government has described as “absolutely unprecedented.”
A farmer named Mick Harris told UK’s The Times that he was feeling a mouse crawl across his face. “I felt a tickly, furry sensation as it crawled from behind my ear across my cheek. It made my skin crawl,” Harris said. “My hair stood up and I jumped out of bed. For the rest of the night, I didn’t sleep a wink — until I caught the mouse in a trap under the bed.”
The mice plague has been especially hard on farmers, who, like Harris, have dealt with rodents invading their homes and disrupting their lives, but also eating their crops and killing their bottom line. According to The Associated Press, NSW Farmers forecasts the plague will lead to losses of more than one billion Australian dollars, or $775 million American dollars. The predicted financial loss stems from the fear that the number of mice in the country could remain high into the winter, leading to devouring several crops before they can be harvested.
The New York Timesspoke with wheat farmer Jeff Fragar who expressed doubts that his family could lose upwards of $30,000 under the expectation that his family would be “lucky” to sell 500 of the 700 metric tonnes they had harvested.
“We’ve had three years where we didn’t even get our crop in the ground because of the drought,” Fragar said. “And we have one half-reasonable year, which the mice are now destroying. If we don’t get it in again, I’d say we’d be out of luck here. The bank won’t carry us any further.”
