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How Humans Create Animal Villains
by Bethany Brookshire
Book Reviewed by:An engrossing and revealing study of why we deem certain animals "pests" and others not - from cats to rats, elephants to pigeons - and what this tells us about our own perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as well as our place in the natural world.
A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don't expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It's no longer an animal. It's a pest.
At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It's not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It's about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It's a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it's entirely a question of perspective.
Bethany Brookshire's deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.
Introduction: A Pest Is _____?
Consider the squirrel.
Many people love squirrels. People cheer for them and smile as their compact, fluffy bodies race over trees and power lines. Every college campus is convinced their squirrels are bolder than any others. I've got a friend who posts a squirrel picture to Twitter every single day, without fail. Squirrels are symbols of fluffy, chipper, charming wildlife come to grace our suburban and urban lives.
Then there's me. Me and F***ing Kevin.
F***ing Kevin is an Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). We call him Kevin for short. He lives in a graceful maple in front of my house. He's a fine, chubby figure of a squirrel. His especially busy tail flicks forward over his back as he trots confidently around my property.
Kevin is my mortal enemy.
This squirrel is the reason I haven't had a tomato from my struggling little garden for at least five years.
I'm a poor gardener at best. But every time the weather warms, optimism kicks in, ...
It's worth noting that Brookshire focuses her book on vertebrates, since they prove much more polarizing than, say, mosquitoes or lice. She starts off with some high-profile pests—rats and snakes—whose very presence is likely to prompt not only loathing but also fear. But, she points out, even those reactions are learned, culturally specific, and, in many cases, revealing of human shortcomings. Wealthy Americans, for example, are apt to point fingers at poor folks living in rat-infested apartment buildings, calling them careless or their homes unsanitary, or to turn up their noses at high concentrations of rats living among encampments of unhoused individuals. Brookshire indicates that perhaps it would be more instructive to examine whether exploitative landlords or the lack of homeless services are the real villains here...continued
Full Review
(688 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Christie Aschwanden, author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
Brookshire convincingly argues that many of the problems we blame on pests arise not from the creatures themselves but from our own self-centered ways of looking at the world. A fascinating look at how culture, traditions, and human behavior shape the way people coexist or come into conflict with the animals that share their habitats. John Shivik, author of The Predator Paradox: Ending the War with Wolves, Bears, Cougars, and Coyotes
As human populations expand and the climate changes, these animals are not going away. Brookshire has a magnificent ability to bring the ecological context of our epic conflicts with everything from snakes to elephants down to the entertaining and personal. Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World
Deeply reported and vividly told, Brookshire's exploration of our most reviled animal neighbors will forever change how you see nature and our relationship to it. Elephants and boas and bears, oh my! Pests is natural history writing at its best.
In her book Pests, Bethany Brookshire provides several examples of introduced species becoming huge destroyers of local wildlife and ecosystems. One of the most well-known (and perhaps, if you dislike snakes as much as I do, most terrifying) examples of this phenomenon is the Burmese python in Florida. A whole section of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission website is devoted to documenting the extent of the problem—and enlisting residents to try to bring it under control.
Opinions vary about precisely when and how this species, which is native to Southeast Asia, arrived in the Florida Everglades. The issue started sometime in the late 1970s and 1980s, when some owners of exotic snakes took to abandoning their ...
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