Australia to launch an inquiry on its teeming pests

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 countless 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 scope of 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 state. Rabbits, the nation's most longstanding introduced pest, would also be investigated, she said.

In an average year pest animals cause about A$420 million (US$316 million) worth of agricultural damage, Agriculture Minister Warren Truss said. Others put the cost in the billions, mostly from European imports.

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

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

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 family blankets, meaning that many face the horrifying task of shaking mice out of beds throughout the night.

Outbreaks of mice in the Darling Downs area of southern Queensland are the worst since a 1995 plague, when billions of rodents devastated A$18 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 state 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 disease 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 pest.

"A swarm of locusts 5km to 6km long and one-half a km wide can come into a crop that's standing 1m high and eat it overnight," Jones said as swarms of locusts attacked green fields of sorghum grain.

"In many cases it's worse than a bushfire, it just wipes everything out," he said after months of swarm attacks.

Officials have even 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 are finding more and more sheep on the populated side of Australia's 6,000km 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. [It is a] very gut-wrenching and emotional problem," Pietsch said.

Nobody knows how many camels and donkeys roam Australia's sandy inland wilds. They were brought into the country in colonial days by exploration teams and then set loose to terrorize the native wildlife.

But up to 10,000 camels a year are caught and exported to the Middle East and Asia.

"[Introduced species] were brought in to fix up one problem that Australia may have been having at the time and caused about 10 more," Elson said.