WHEN South Australian farmer John Gregory entered his piggery he could not believe what he saw - mice attacking his pigs. Since he first saw them dining out on his prized stock he has been at his wit's end about how to get rid of them.
Now, as a desperate last resort, he is covering his pigs at a farm property in Wynarka, 130km east of Adelaide, in engine oil to protect them from the mice, with the rodents apparently turned off by the taste.
"The mouse problem got really bad in April," Mr Gregory said.
"We went away in the school holidays and when we came back we drove up the driveway and it looked like the ground was moving - there were hundreds of thousands of them."
Mr Gregory, 50, 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," Gregory said. "I mix icing sugar and cement. The icing sugar attracts the mice, they eat it and then the cement clogs them up."
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