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.

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.

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.