I Laughed So Hard

This really belongs on Small Dead Animals, but you have to read it here for now:

Not content with destroying their energy infrastructure, the Greens in Germany banned the primary agricultural rodent poison in 2008 due to environmental impacts.

The results have been alternately tragic and hilarious:

Farmers in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are complaining that millions of field mice are devastating their food crops, including corn, barley and winter wheat. "They are eating everything," said Matthias Krieg, who manages an agricultural firm near the town of Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt. "Not even the sugar beets are safe."...

Farmers already noticed an increase in the field mouse population in 2011 and began to take counter measures. According to Reinhard Kopp, a spokesman for the Thuringian Farmers' Association, agriculturalists set up hundreds of perches in their fields to lure birds of prey to kill the mice. But the operation was only moderately successful. "The birds got so fat from eating all the mice that they almost couldn't fly any more," Kopp said. "But they still couldn't keep up."
...
Instead, agriculturalists want drastic action. They have requested permission to deploy a rat poison called Ratron. Farmers in Germany have been banned from using the poison on large areas since 2008. Ironically, it was the indiscriminate use of Ratron by farmers in Saxony-Anhalt that led the agency to ban it in the first place, after the poison killed wild geese and endangered European hamsters.

The pensioners who can't afford to keep their lights on can now snicker at the farmers' suffering. A lot of those receiving the fat solar subsidies are farmers. Of course it won't be fun much longer as food prices rise!

I concede that I am not a nice person for laughing so hard, but what did everyone expect?

Two hard winters partly shielded the farmers from the results of the rodent poison ban, but this last winter was milder, so the inevitable happened. What they need is cats. Tens of thousands of them. But then the cats would eat the wild birds (think about the US campaign to ban outdoor cats).

Also the cats might end the mouse plague, and then the raptors would have to eat kittens. This would cause severe suffering in Germany, where laws protect household rodents from the cruelty of their human roommates.

If they do authorize the use of poison, then those fat raptors are going to be fat corpses, because they'll be eating poisoned rodents. Farmers have a lot of clout in Germany, so I presume they'll win this battle, but not before losing a good portion of this year's crop.

// posted by MaxedOutMama @ 7/11/2012 07:27:00 AM