AO Wants to Know is an ongoing interview series where we ask experts in extraordinary subjects to share their knowledge with us.
“When animals associate with us, we tend to go [one of] two ways,” says science journalist Bethany Brookshire. “We either bring them inside and call them Princess Fluffypants and they become our pets or domesticates. Or we hate them with the fire of a thousand suns, and we try to eradicate them from the planet.” In Brookshire’s book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, she examines a label we apply freely to some animals, but not others.
Pests opens with an anecdote from Brookshire’s suburban backyard in Washington, D.C., about a garden-raiding squirrel she nicknamed “F***ing Kevin.” “And F***ing Kevin still exists,” she says. “I almost tripped over him while running today, and I was really mad about it.” Brookshire’s anger about Kevin invading her space becomes her jumping-off point to explore other “problem” animals around the world, and our often-contradictory reactions to them. She chose to not write about insects because in Western cultures, they don’t often rouse the same “feelings of internal conflict” as vertebrates. Swatting a mosquito doesn’t tend to present a moral quandary in the way that mice in the cellar or deer in the flowerbed can.
“Where we believe an animal belongs is what provides context to that animal's existence,” she says. “And that's so wild to me, because that's all on us. The animals have done nothing but be themselves.” In one chapter, she describes the veneration of sacred rats at the Karni Mata temple in Deshnoke, India. Worshippers consider the temple rats to be disease-free, reincarnated humans, and would not necessarily be pleased to encounter a regular rat in their homes. In other cases, our positive feelings toward a species can make us overlook the damage some individuals do. It’s harder to stomach the culling of invasive cats than invasive cane toads, both of which devastate the ecosystems they invade. Tourists who travel to see Kenya’s elephants don’t see the harm they cause to local farmers, whose hands are tied by strict federal protections on “the government’s cattle” (which happen to be a strong source of tourism dollars).
In asking us to consider our place in these conflicts, Brookshire proposes that, while animals associating with humans is inevitable, villainizing them doesn’t have to be. Atlas Obscura asked Brookshire about problem elephants, why we started hating on pigeons, and what makes an animal friend or foe.
When did you first become interested in pests?
I first started thinking about human/wildlife conflict in 2016, when I was writing a piece for Science News about a paper documenting the earliest origins of the house mouse in the Levant. And I was just astonished that, from the very first minute we had houses, we had house mice. We had house mice before we had agriculture! The instant we started settling in one place and permanently altering our environments, other animals were like, “That looks good.” I became really fixated on these animals that become associated with humans, and then I became especially interested in why we hate them.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned in your research?
There are two things that surprised me. One is the speed at which our beliefs can change. I was really astonished to find that the pigeon has only descended in the public consciousness as “a rat with wings” for less than a century. We used to adore pigeons. We used to think they were wonderful—and they really are! I mean, if you look closely at a pigeon, they're beautiful birds. Now, we don't appreciate them at all, and that's entirely due to the fact that they are what I call the “outdated iPhone of the animal world.” We have technology that has replaced all the things we used pigeons for, yet they're still around us because we domesticated them. They're still here, but now we've decided that they're awful.
The other thing I found really fascinating was how fast environments themselves can change. In Australia, I learned during my research just how much different species are already evolving to get around the [invasive] cane toads. Some are adapting behaviorally. There are crows and water rats that will flip over a cane toad and cut it open, and they’ll only eat the bits that are okay, like the liver, because the rest of it is poisonous. And then there are native snakes in Australia that have begun to display smaller heads, because a tiny head cannot eat a toad. It's just amazing to me how even when we screw up—I'm not saying nature can handle it, because nature can't always—but life's gonna find a way, and things are going to change.
Do some cultures have a less-antagonistic relationship with animal pests than others?
I would say it's more that they do not view them as pests. They have different ways of seeing them. There were some members of Indigenous groups that I spoke with who did not have a word in their historic languages for pest. A pest implies that something is yours, and that someone else is trying to take it. You have to have this concept of ownership over space that some Indigenous groups don't necessarily have.
It was also interesting how many different groups that I spoke to had beliefs that changed how they interacted with animals. India has way more venomous snakes than the U.S. does, and yet people there are not as utterly terrified, screaming “Go chop its head off with a hoe!” about snakes [like Americans do]. And that's because they have different ideas about what snakes are, and what snakes do, and where snakes belong.
Differences in belief strongly influence how different animals are treated. If there are rats on this island that are destroying seabird nests, we're going to drop tons of poison to eradicate all of the rats. We will absolutely do that. But if it's cats? We're going to want to trap them, neuter and release them, maybe we'll see if it's worth adopting them out. Or something, anything, right?
I spoke with people who were actually tackling this in Hawai'i, and they had a rough time telling me what they did to the cats. Because, yes, they kill the cats, and it is terrible. PR people get really upset about this. And it's just so interesting to realize this huge divide between these two animals [rats and cats], even though they are doing the exact same thing. The difference is in what we believe; and what we believe about rats is so incredibly different from what we believe about cats.
I paired the chapter on cats with the chapter on elephants [in one section of the book] for the same reason. I wanted to find examples where the beliefs of some people drastically impact how those animals are treated.
People who don’t live alongside elephants might not realize they could become a pest or a danger to human beings.
For many people who live in the West, elephants are beautiful, they are perfect, they are wise. And they are all of those things. But they also cause millions of dollars in crop damages, and they kill people every year. The year the book was published, in 2022, four farmers died [in Kenya], but not by elephants. They were shot and killed by their own National Guard, because they were protesting the way they felt the government preferred elephants over Kenyan farmers. They blocked the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway as one of their protests, which is one of two major arteries in Kenya, and lined it with tires and wouldn't let people pass. [Local government denounced the killings by police and launched a misconduct investigation.]
And when you think about that, it leads you to realize elephants don't necessarily know or care what we're doing, but the way people in the West view these animals drastically changes the lives of the people who live close to them. And I think that's a really important thing that we need to consider. That's not to say elephants are not incredibly valuable. They really, really are. But it's an extremely complex situation.
What would you like people to understand about animal pests?
I'm a science journalist first and foremost, so when it comes down to it, I just really want to tell people cool stuff that I've learned. I am that person. I cannot be held back from gossiping excitedly about amazing things.
But that aside, I wanted people to recognize that we live in environments. One of the things I found most striking about studying human attitudes is how much we, in Western, Global North culture in particular, see ourselves as being separated from the natural world. Because here we are in our offices, with heat, and there's no bugs in here (that we can see), so we have this idea that we are somehow separate from nature—but we never are. We exist within an environment that has other living things in it. And so I want people to see the world around them differently, and see themselves as part of something we so often think of as separate.
How has working on the book affected your own relationship with nature?
I am learning how to hunt deer for meat, and that's not something I ever considered doing before writing the book. But as I grew to learn more about the environments that we've created that have allowed deer to thrive, and the way we have made ourselves the only predator in that environment, and the extreme impact that deer can have—to the point of their own destruction—on the forest that we've created, it made me see human hunting very differently. I spoke with and learned from many Indigenous peoples who hunt for subsistence, and they have ideas that are very different from the way that many of us think about taking a life.
It also made me think differently about how we enforce what is ours, and how we interact with our environment. I’ve become much more tolerant of animals taking my stuff, but I've also become much more defensive. I now actually have a galvanized steel garden cage. Nothing’s getting in that thing. And I had a full harvest this year. I'm feeling really good about myself. But I also had a couple of squash that happened to grow outside of the cage, and I was like, “Go on, have them. It’s fine.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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