Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains

by Bethany Brookshire Narrated by Courtney Patterson

Overview

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Courtney Patterson is an especially engaging narrator whose pleasingly expressive voice can make almost any topic palpable, including rats, mice, and other common vermin. Pests. In some places they’re elephants, or cats. The listener will be surprised to hear how many varieties there are, and how deeply pests are wedded to the human ecosystem and the balance of nature generally. Patterson anchors her performance to the narrative’s lively first-person reporting, treating its loose assembly of chapters as a travelogue, which in many ways it is. Taking us from one research lab and one ecological site to another, this personable and accomplished narrator maintains a steady engagement with, and at the same time a comfortable distance from, all these snakes, coyotes, pigeons, and other bothersome critters. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/10/2022

Brookshire, host of the Science for the People podcast, debuts with an eye-opening account of why certain animals are demonized. As she writes, “Our reactions to the animals in our lives are often a wild seesaw of deadly conflict and cooing compassion.” That fraught dynamic plays out in the various viewpoints held on many species; some people view the growth of the American deer population as a good thing, for example, while others note the harm the animals have wrought on ecosystems. Brookshire covers a wealth of other creatures whose images shift depending on culture and context: snakes were once viewed as “good spirits” before the Bible ruined their reputation; rats, which are widely viewed as filthy, are worshipped in a temple in Deshnoke, India; and well before pigeons were pigeonholed as “a health menace” in the 1960s, they were domesticated. With clever anecdotes and fascinating history, Brookshire makes a solid case that humans ought to reconsider their relationships with animals: “Nature isn’t always going to be tame and neutered for our pleasure.... It runs through our walls and in our sewers. It eats our trash and our crops.... We need to learn there’s more than one way to be strong.” Animal lovers will adore this clever survey. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (Dec.)

From the Publisher

"👍!" — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

“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.” — Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

“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.” — Christie Aschwanden, author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

“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.” — John Shivik, author of The Predator Paradox: Ending the War with Wolves, Bears, Cougars, and Coyotes

“A deeply thoughtful yet entertaining tour of our thorny and morally complicated relationships with the creatures we consider pests. Integrating first-rate storytelling with ecology, natural history, wildlife management, cultural anthropology, and ethics, Pests provides a compelling perspective on a misunderstood aspect of human-animal interactions.” — Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“In this scintillating, searching, and surprisingly funny debut, Brookshire weaves together history, research, and Indigenous knowledge to reveal our complicity in creating animal conflict—and argues for a new model of coexistence in which neither we nor the animals have to end up as the villains.” — Maryn McKenna, author of Big Chicken, Superbug, and Beating Back the Devil

"[An] excellent natural history...the author delivers fascinating accounts of a score of widely deplored pests...Outstanding, possibly mind-changing natural history." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“…An eye-opening account of why certain animals are demonized…Animal lovers will adore this clever survey.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An entertaining and pensive perusal of the human-wildlife conflict problem that calls to mind Mary Roach's Fuzz." — Booklist

Library Journal

07/01/2022

From bats in the belfry to rats in the garden to rabbits, deer, pigeons, coyotes, and more, there are many animals that humans have come to regard as pests. As award-winning science journalist Brookshire argues, this has nothing to do with the animals themselves and everything to do with the line we draw between what we see as ours and the wild other. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Courtney Patterson is an especially engaging narrator whose pleasingly expressive voice can make almost any topic palpable, including rats, mice, and other common vermin. Pests. In some places they’re elephants, or cats. The listener will be surprised to hear how many varieties there are, and how deeply pests are wedded to the human ecosystem and the balance of nature generally. Patterson anchors her performance to the narrative’s lively first-person reporting, treating its loose assembly of chapters as a travelogue, which in many ways it is. Taking us from one research lab and one ecological site to another, this personable and accomplished narrator maintains a steady engagement with, and at the same time a comfortable distance from, all these snakes, coyotes, pigeons, and other bothersome critters. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-09-24
Page-turning stories of creatures most of us despise, mostly undeservedly.

Brookshire, the host of the podcast Science for the People, begins her excellent natural history in a beautiful Indian temple filled with perhaps 25,000 common rats. According to the local religion, these rats are reincarnated people, so they are fed, cared for, and worshipped. Chronicling her travels around the world to interview experts, the author delivers fascinating accounts of a score of widely deplored pests, from the no-brainers (rats, mice, pigeons) to the controversial (snakes, deer, raccoons) to a few shockers. Readers may be surprised to learn that pigeon was once a major food source. City dwellers raised them on roofs and in backyards. After World War II, cheap supermarket chicken took over, and the pigeons were released to thrive on the streets. The first recorded description of pigeons as “rats with wings” came in 1966. Few consider cats to be drivers of environmental problems, but “feral, stray, and outdoor domestic cats together slaughter one to four billion birds and six to twenty-two billion mammals every year in the contiguous United States.” Worldwide, they are the leading cause of animal extinction, especially on islands, including Australia, where cats are officially designated pests. As Brookshire shows throughout, the concept of a pest is in the eye of the beholder. “Rats are disgusting because humans are,” she notes. They thrive on human garbage and sewage, and we are too lazy to seal our trash and too cheap to pay the taxes to build rat-free infrastructure and housing. Elephants are magnificent, but they destroy crops and kill a surprising number of people. “Between 2014 and 2019, 2,398 people died in India—trampled and torn apart by elephants.” Though humans are voracious predators, when we encounter a “pest,” we feel like prey. In the insightful conclusion, Brookshire emphasizes that we must give up some power, tolerate occasional inconvenience, and acknowledge that there are some things we cannot control.

Outstanding, possibly mind-changing natural history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175357005
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	902,235

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