A new national anthem for Australia could easily be a remake of a song made popular by Rod Stewart. The title would be, "Have I toad you lately I don’t love you?" An estimated 100 million cane toads, fatal to Australian predators such as crocodiles and dingoes because of their toxic skin, have multiplied out of control. The toads, native to South America, were imported to Australia in the 1930s to eat beetles that were destroying crops. They proved to be a sorry solution. As a result of the plague of toads, a member of Australia’s parliament upset animal-welfare advocates when he recently urged all citizens to kill as many poisonous cane toads as possible. "Hit them with cricket bats, golf clubs and the like," was his call to action. The toad-welfare people are telling everyone not to bludgeon the toads, but rather put them in a freezer until they die. Apparently, slowly freezing to death next to fish caught last summer and trays of ice cubes is more humane. It seems fair to say that freezing countless numbers of live toads to death in home freezers might not be all that good for unsuspecting people who open the freezers. They will shockingly discover what appears to be tiny toad actors, sprawled every which way in a realistic re-enactment of America’s Donner Pass tragedy. The freezing of poisonous toads might lead to complications other than grandmotherly homemakers discovering frozen toads stuck to the tops of ice cream pails and packages of frozen peas. A small, innocent child might grab one of the poisonous toads and bite into it, temporarily mistaking it for one of those ice cream novelty treats with its stick missing. The possibility also exists that the frozen toads, after they’re removed from the freezers, might thaw out and survive. One minute they might be piled on the kitchen table like so many little, stiff green logs and the next minute they might be invading every closet of the house. My family’s closest brush with an amphibian plague coincided with the annual migration of frogs from one lake to another in a remote corner of northwestern Minnesota. It all had something to do with the frogs mating, hatching eggs or moving to a better neighborhood. There were many theories. My husband, one of our daughters and I were being driven from an airport to a small cabin in the middle of a moonless night by one of the locals. Our driver wore a black shirt inscribed with disparaging remarks about someone’s mother and the road surfaces were totally covered with the hopping, croaking frogs. Croaking took on a new perspective as they and our car tires became inseparable on the lonely secondary road. As the car careened wildly from side to side of the road, slippery and wet with thousands of frogs migrating to a better life, our driver told us about a motorcycle accident that changed his life, if not his mind, forever. "Saw a doc down in Minneapolis and he said my IQ is only 80 now. Isn’t that something? Who’d ever think I’d be driving a car again?" His words were accompanied by the splats, splashes and thunk-a-thunks beneath the car. Huddled in the backseat with my husband and daughter, I couldn’t imagine what was more frightening — hydroplaning off the road on the slippery frog bodies or being driven around by a self-described medical miracle. It was the longest car ride of my life.
