Toad in the Hole

Beer bounty for cane toads
By Peter Michael
February 26, 2007

TOM Hedley, Australia's biggest private hotel owner and one of Queensland's richest men, has thrown his support behind plans to introduce a beer-for-a-bag-of-toads bounty. KEN Ritchie never thought he'd see the day a cane toad would be worth its weight in beer, let alone two.

"Hell, I'll give them two beers," said Mr Hedley, who also owns and drinks at his favourite watering hole the Red Beret. Latest estimates are that there are between 100 and 200 million cane toads in Australia, which means at the standard Queensland "pot" glass size of 285mls, it would take 57 million litres of free beer to wipe out pest - at two toads a bag. But Mr Hedley thinks it will be money well spent. "As far as I am concerned they're pests and a nuisance to society," said Mr Hedley. "If offering a beer for a bag of toads is one way to wipe them out once and for all then I am all for it," he said.

The RSPCA welcomed the multi-millionaire's backing, saying the proposal could be modelled on a similar beer-for-a-toad bounty run in the Northern Territory.

"How it worked in Darwin is they brought in the toads to the RSPCA to be humanely euthanised and they were then issued a voucher to get a beer – with a daily limit on the number of beers," said RSPCA spokesman Michael Beatty.

"It could be more than a gimmick. It could seriously help reduce the toad population, especially around suburbia," he said.

All those years belting the crap out of those ugly creatures for free - all that beer I could have been swimming in!! Though one assumes the gratis grog is not extended to the under 12's...

And in the same newspaper:-

Dinner plate sized cane toad found in NT
February 27, 2007

A cane toad the size of a dinner plate has been found on a Northern Territory golf course, provoking alarm about their march across Australia.

Ground keeper Phillip Jones came found the creature on one of the fairways at The Gardens Golf Course in Darwin city early this morning.

Shocked by its size, he clubbed the toad before showing it to other staff members. "You know those big rubber buckets? Well, if you looked inside it fills the whole of the bottom of it," said the golf course's functions manager Lars Holm.

Mr Holm said he suspected monsoonal rains in Darwin had probably flushed the toad out into the open.

First released in Queensland, cane toads have since multiplied and marched across Australia, poisoning millions of native animals, including crocodiles in World Heritage-listed Kakadu.

The NT Government has teamed with other states in a concerted effort to stop their invasion. But with no known way of stopping the toads, it is up to scientists to find a solution.

"The only way we are going to get rid of them is to give the CSIRO money to research and see what they can do," Mr Holm said. "There is no point running around trying to club the bastards because there is just too many of them."

And it seems in Darwin they are breeding them big. "Phillip is a Queenslander but he's never seen one as big as that," Mr Holm said. "He was pretty shocked, we all were when we saw it. After I took a look I said: `Good, now bury the bugger'."