Over the weekend, Australians united for a common cause: the destruction of the cane toad. Thousands of toads were collected by Queensland residents and brought to a morbid block party where they were summarily frozen or gassed to death.
“To see the look on the faces of the kids as we were handling and weighing the toads and then euthanizing them was just…,” Townsville City Councilman Vern Veitch said, breaking off to let out a contented sigh. “The children really got into the character of the event.”
Why such heart warmth over this mass extermination? In short, the cane toad was imported to Australia in the 1930s in the hope that it would control their cane beetle population. Instead, the toad has turned into a pest of its own since it can’t jump high enough to affect the cane beetle population and, thanks to its poison glands, there are no natural predators to keep its reproduction rate in check. Since the original introduction of 102 toads, the population has grown to several million and spread across much of northern Australia.
The story of Australians’ very bizarre love/hate relationship with this critter is best told in the hilarious documentary, “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History”. Here’s a small excerpt. Warning: a mouse is sacrificed to science, art, and cane toad hunger in this clip.
The complete “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History”:
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I think a cane toad might eat a cane toad. Not much else, as far as I can remember from the doco.
I once came upon a cane toad, the size of a football, with a tick on its head the size of big grape. I tried to help the guy out by picking it off, and it actually allowed me to approach and grapple with the tick for a while, but it was really stuck on there and before I could get it off it hopped lethargically away into the woods.
you can’t train a fukin toad!!!
there stupid and gay and should all just fall over and die!!
Update from Vientiane: was chasing a cane toad around the pool, Aussie guy warned me not to mess with it. Decried the horrors of the infestation and went through a litany of gruesome techniques for extermination. He said there is one kind of bird that can eat them, and it does it by turning it inside out. Lao girl chimed in that her dad eats them and she has had a couple. So, now we have three possible cane toad consumers — the cane toad himself, some kind of bird, and that most rapacious of omnivores, Man.
They’re not a unnatural creature, its just that ignorant Cane farmers decided that they’d add them to their fields believing they could keep the pests that grew in large numbers due to monoculture practices down.
As for eating mice, on that count they’d be classed as a benefit, unfortunately they’re eating the native amphibians too. While it would be good to reset things back to how they should be in Australia my suspicion is that this will not be possible, if its not possible then any campaign to kill them will just result in cruelty for no purpose.
And getting Joe public to help in eradicate them really worries me, does the average person really know the difference between a cane toad and a native toad? That latter is already dying out across the world without an extra hard push from mankind.