South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Brookshire’s ‘Pests’ examines our relationship with animals
Bethany Brookshire, an author and science journalist, really likes pigeons. She also really likes mice, rats, deer and snakes, and is fascinated by all the ways they drive people crazy.
Her new book, “Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains,” recently published by Ecco, examines our relationship with, and our responsibility to, the animals that live around us, nibbling our leftovers and burrowing into our gardens.
In some cases, animals became what we consider pests because humans transported them outside their natural habitats, and they adapted in ways we hadn’t anticipated.
In other instances, Brookshire argues, what makes them pests is our frame of mind.
“Every city has their rat,” Brookshire said. “In some places, it is a lizard; in some places, it’s a mouse; in some places, it’s a Burmese python. Every location has an animal that they hate, an animal that just drives them bonkers.”
Jonathan Richardson, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Richmond, said that every species Brookshire highlights in the book is just trying to eat, reproduce and survive. But those pursuits happen to intersect with our lives in ways we dislike.
“There’s also some irony in how we view pests,” he said, “as other species would certainly characterize Homo sapiens as having some of the same traits that mark pests as pests.”
To report her book, Brookshire went hunting for Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades and learned how difficult they are to find: One way to kill a few in one night is to outfit a snake with a tracking device and hope it joins a snake orgy.
On another expedition, Brookshire held a baby bear in her jacket while its mother snoozed nearby, having been shot with a dart gun loaded with anesthetic as part of a tagging effort to track bears in populated areas.
She discovered that lions smell terrible, like “threeday-dead zebra.” She also found out that in Australia, there are feral horses called brumbies and that some conservation biologists want them shot from helicopters because they are stomping all over alpine bogs.
Pigeons, the birds we sometimes call “rats with wings,” Brookshire said, used to win medals for bravery and ran correspondence during the early days of modern journalism. Pigeons — technically rock doves — were likely domesticated at least 5,000 years ago and are still surprisingly comfortable with humans. Brought to the Americas to be eaten, pigeons were raised on many rooftops in New
York City until the practice was banned in 1930.
In some other countries, elephants can pose serious threats to the lives and livelihoods of those who live nearby.
“For those who don’t live with elephants, it’s easy to think that the only human-elephant conflict there could be is the kind that humans perpetrate, the kind that poaches these beautiful creatures for their oversized incisors,” Brookshire wrote. “But elephants are also living tanks, capable of killing, disemboweling, knocking down houses and eating a farmer’s entire crop for the season. Human-elephant conflict can go both ways.”
Cats, on the other hand, are cute and fluffy, if not always cuddly. But cats are also killers. Cats are responsible for the extinction of dozens of species globally, and they threaten hundreds more.
In Australia, home to millions of feral cats that have hunted 25 mammal species to extinction, the cats are designated pests, which means they can be shot, trapped and poisoned.
“These extinctions are really our fault,” Brookshire wrote. “We are the ones who brought cats to all their new destinations, opening their eyes to novel, succulent cat snacks.”
In much of her book, Brookshire tries to draw such lessons, pointing out that these animals are just trying to survive. It is our job to decide how best to live with them and minimize the disruptions that inevitably come when humans and wildlife exist in proximity.
As respectful as she tried to be in her book of both the animals and the humans who must live with them, she said she still expects some blowback. “I know this is going to make people mad,” she said. “Especially about cats. People get riled about cats.”