#sure they have genuinely well meaning members but the organization does so outlandish dumbass attention grabbing shit

[nimbus-tatze]

so i have a twenty min break and i can't stop thinking about that mouse plague in Australia. Imagine working your butt off during a pretty tough time only to have the results be chewed through. Plenty of farmers don't make money throughout the year except for a handful of times (depending on their crops/livestock). There is no real regular monthly income for many farmers, it's more of a yearly income.

When that harvest is entirely destroyed? Yeah good luck surviving the next season. And in the case of a rodent plague, it's rare to be able to save anything. You have to destroy your harvest bc otherwise you'd poison those that eat it.

So

1) you can't sell it

2) you can't feed it to your animals

3) you can't just let it stay, bc otherwise the mice will continue to feed on it, so you have to destroy it, often by burning your harvest, bc that way you can at least take away a good chunk of the rodents food source

Those videos were tough for me to watch, farmers having to burn their own shit, and it's not even my operation.

And to top it off those rodents chew through everything, including wire insulation and so maybe your tractor goes up in flames too. On top of the food in your fridge rotting bc the mice broke it by chewing through the insulations/wires etc. Your furniture full of holes, mice shit everywhere.

Not to mention, how the hell are you gonna sleep properly when you constantly hear those little feet walk in your room in the middle of the night? I'm not afraid of mice or disgusted of them, but I'd get pretty sick of them if they are literally everywhere, not just the outdoors or the barn, but your farmhouse too. Open the cupboards? Mice. Look for the remote that fell behind the couch? Mice. Go to the bathroom? Mice. Like that's just depressing.

One of the farmers mentioned that they caught 20-30 mice INSIDE their home every night. Every night you catch 20-30, just inside? Imagine what the mice traps by the barn look like.

It's easy to read 'mouse plague' and see a few pictures and be like 'yikes' but it's an absolute disaster for farmers and their mental health, their operations, and everybodies health. Let alone food supply. That shit is gonna show up in the prices.

There is a bunch of things you can do to take care of pests and any good management will keep track of that and ensure preventive measures, but a plague? That's just waves of mice arriving on your doorstep over night. You can't really prep for that.

And to have ARAs suggest a catch and release strategy on top of all these disasters is all you need to know about how far removed from reality they are. Tbh I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that the peta rep wasn't a troll, but was totally serious. Put aside the idiocy of her suggestion, it puts more stress on farmers if the uninformed public also eats that shit up. It's a plague. A literal good old biblical style plague i'm muslim but you get the point.

I really wonder what other field has to deal with this asinine and pointless kind of PR trouble. I'm increasingly starting to believe that there is no other field that has to waste quite as much energy as the agricultural field on explaining why the 'activists' suggestions are wrong and dangerous.

No one is saying to torture the mice. But they have to go. And that means dead, not put them elsewhere where they can continue to reproduce and then overrun rural areas again.

Anyone suggesting catch and release can pack their bags and move to the farms to work full time as a mice catcher. See how it's like to wake up with mice crawling over your bed and showing up in every nook and cranny. And if not? All this talk? It isn't just talk. It puts strain on people that are already in a dangerous situation.

Anyway, my respects to farmers that deal with this mess. And a hearty wake up with mice shit in your hair to peta :)