Farmer covers pigs in engine oil to stop them being eaten by mice

When Australian farmer John Gregory entered his piggery he couldn't believe what he saw - mice attacking his pigs. Since he first saw them dining out on his prized stock in Wynarka, 130km east of Adelaide, the 50-year-old father of four has been at his wit's end about how to get rid of them. Now, as a desperate last resort, he's resorted to covering his pigs in engine oil to protect them from the mice, which he says are turned off by the taste.



Mr Gregory said he put engine oil on his 15 pigs to protect them from the sun about once a month. "But now I oil them every week, because the mice have run out of food and they're just eating anything, so they were climbing up on the pigs and chewing them," he said. "The oil stops them eating the pigs because they don't like the taste."

And with mouse bait so expensive, he said farmers were resorting to home recipes to kill the vermin, which had multiplied to plague proportions because of summer rain producing great crops - ideal mouse food. "Being farmers we're always trying to do things cheap," Mr Gregory, from Wynarka, said. "I mix icing sugar and cement, the icing sugar attracts the mice, they eat it and then the cement clogs them up."

Video shows mouse plague in the area south of Adelaide. Contains dead mice.

YouTube link.

There are still so many mice, that leaving buckets around buildings is proving an effective trapping method. "I have about 50 buckets around the place, they just drop into them and can't get out." He said he was catching hundreds of mice every night and that he'd never seen a plague this bad, but that the mice were starting to eat each other - which was a good indication the end of the plague was in sight.