Two thousand mice dropped on Guam by parachute — to kill snakes

Two thousand mice dropped on Guam by parachute — to kill snakes:

That's because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.

Andersen, like other large industrial complexes on the South Pacific island, is regularly bedeviled by power failures caused when the snakes wriggle their way into electric substations — an average of 80 a year, costing as much as $4 million in annual repair costs and lost productivity, the Interior Department estimated in 2005.


"For some reason, the snakes are almost uniquely sensitive to acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the ubiquitous over-the-counter painkiller. If you can get a tree snake to eat just 80 milligrams, you can kill it. That's only about one-sixth of a standard pill — pigs, dogs and other similarly sized animals would have to eat about 500 of them to get into any trouble."

'via Blog this'