Plagues of animals engulf Australia

By MICHAEL BYRNES

SYDNEY - What's worse? A hundred billion starving locusts, a billion ravenous mice or a million flesh-eating wild dogs?

Australia is fighting simultaneous swarms of locusts, rampaging attacks on sheep by wild dogs and new outbreaks of mice. The island continent's vast uncontrolled spaces make it one of the countries hardest hit by pests.

For many farmers, a just-announced parliamentary inquiry into the impact of pest animals on Australia's multi-billion-dollar agriculture sector is long overdue.

"We're looking at anything and everything and the effect it has on the broad community," committee chairwoman Kay Elson said.

Wild dogs, cats, rats, foxes, toads and locusts would all be included in the inquiry, she said.

Also in the inquiry's sights are wild camels and donkeys attacking animals and causing environmental damage as they roam Australia's north and wild pigs wiping out crops in southern Queensland. Rabbits, the nation's longest-standing introduced pest, will also be investigated.

In an average year, pest animals cause about A$420 million ($490 million) worth of agricultural damage, Agriculture Minister Warren Truss said. Others put the cost in the billions.

Years of enduring pest attacks without government help have left farmers bruised.

"Some [inquiries] end up as talk-fests. We need results," said a spokeswoman for Queensland farmers organisation AgForce.

Farmers who have lived through a uniquely Australian mice plague say there is nothing worse.

Billions of mice get into everything, eating crops as well as home electrical wiring, televisions and computers from the inside out.

Farming families have been reduced to placing bed legs in buckets of water. But not even that keeps all the mice out of the blankets, meaning many families face the horrifying task of shaking mice out of beds throughout the night.

Outbreaks of mice in Darling Downs in southern Queensland are the worst since 1995, when billions of rodents devastated A$18 million ($21 million) worth of crops. Authorities say they could get much worse.

Other farmers say rabbits are the worst long-term pest, after two dozen of the cuddly animals, imported into Victoria in 1859 for sport, bred hundreds of millions which explosively spread throughout the country.

The problem soon grew to such a vast scale that settlers built a rabbit-proof fence around the country's populated coastal fringe, then introduced the myxomatosis virus in 1950 to kill 500 million of the pests. Later still, the calicivirus was introduced in the 1990s to kill tens of millions more.

Disease-resistant rabbits still breed in the bush.

Queensland grains grower Murray Jones said locusts were the worst.

"A swarm of locusts 5km to 6km long and half a kilometre wide can come into a crop that's standing three feet high and eat it overnight," Jones said from his property as swarms of locusts attacked green fields of sorghum grain. "In many cases it's worse than a bushfire, it just wipes everything out."

Officials have felt it necessary to reassure city dwellers that locusts don't eat washing as it hangs out to dry - unless the insects are really hungry and the clothes are green.

Europeans can't be blamed for the locusts which have swarmed across an area more than twice the size of England.

But attacks on sheep by wild descendants of European dogs which have interbred with native dingoes are clearly the result of the arrival in Australia of European settlers.

Woolgrower Robert Pietsch says millions of feral dogs, which are extending their territory from central Queensland to coastal and urban areas, are the most feared predator for sheep.

Every morning farmers find more and more sheep on the populated side of Australia's 6000km dingo fence, an improved version of the original rabbit fence, with large chunks bitten from their rear ends and sides.

"Locusts will come and go, a lot of pests will come and go, but wild dogs are an ongoing problem," Pietsch said.

Nobody knows how many camels and donkeys roam Australia's sandy inland wilds. They were introduced in colonial days by exploration teams and set loose to terrorise native wildlife. Up to 10,000 camels a year are caught and exported.

The year-long inquiry could lead to poison baiting and shooting and increased Government funding for pest control.