When I first paged through (The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals), I wondered if it might be an ambitious hoax. Here were bears formally excommunicated from the Church. Slugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of “smiting.” But the author, a respected historian and linguist, quickly wore me down with a depth of detail gleaned from original documents, nineteen of which are reproduced in their original languages in a series of appendices. We have the itemized expense report of a French bailiff, submitted in 1403 following the murder trial of a pig (“cost of keeping her in jail, six sols parisis”). We have writs of ejectment issued to rats and thrust into their burrows. From a 1545 complaint brought by vintners against a species of greenish weevil, we have not only the names of the lawyers but early examples of that time-honored legal tactic, the stall. As far as I could tell, the proceedings dragged on eight or nine months — in any case, longer than the lifespan of a weevil. I present all this not as evidence of the silliness of bygone legal systems but as evidence of the intractable nature of human-wildlife conflict — as it is known today by those who grapple with it professionally. The question has defied satisfactory resolution for centuries: What is the proper course when nature breaks laws intended for people?
I like Mary Roach: I like the enthusiasm she brings to her research, I like her voice and her compassion, her globe-trotting travel writing and her gentle humour. But I don’t know if I love her books: Whenever I see a new release, I think, “Oh yeah, I like Mary Roach”, but I’ve never given one of her books more than three stars. When I saw that Fuzz was available on NetGalley, I once again said, “Oh, yes please”, and again, three stars (which, in my reckoning, is a solid read, just not life-altering). I’m sure I will read Roach again — I will always think of her as an author I like — and for other readers who like her, I’ve no doubt they’ll like this book, too. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Animals don’t follow laws, they follow instincts. Almost without exception, the wildlife in these pages are simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, shitting, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops. Nonetheless the conflicts exist, creating dilemmas for people and municipalities, hardships for wildlife, and material for someone else’s unusual book.
Between that opening bit about the history of people suing animals and the publisher’s blurb (What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? ), I thought this book was going to be quite a bit weirder than it actually is. What Fuzz actually entails is Mary Roach joining wildlife officers around the world as they try to find the most humane methods of preventing animals from inconveniencing the humans who have decided to build a home in the animals’ territory. This can involve hunting, trapping and relocating, poisoning, and at the cutting edge of wildlife control, gene-editing. The stories, and the overall format of Roach learning something and seeing where that leads to next, became a little samey-same, but it was consistently interesting (except for maybe where the chapter about “killer trees” — in which Roach joined some arborists as they lopped the tops off of dead Douglas firs on Vancouver Island — led into a chapter on the killing potential of castor beans and rosary peas; semi-interesting but felt really off topic.)
As always, Roach is an interesting storyteller with an offbeat sense of humour:
• I collect my lunch sack and follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”
• The tiny bodega isn’t so much ransacked as flattened. A wall of corrugated steel lies crumpled beneath a concrete support beam. On another occasion, an elephant broke into Padma’s home while she slept. This is a place where “the elephant in the room” is not a metaphor, where elephant jokes are no joke. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? Probably around 11: 00 p.m.
• “And there is the border with Italy!” I follow Tornini’s gaze to the massive wall that surrounds the Holy See. A gull glides over. There’s your symbol of peace, I think to myself. A bird, any bird, soaring over walls, ignoring borders! Peace, freedom, unity! It’s possible I’ve had too many espressos.
And, of course, I learned plenty: “Gooney bird” comes from the term used by the US military for the albatrosses that live on Guam and would fly into jet engines; birds’ innards will not explode if they eat raw rice at weddings (just note the birds that help themselves to rice growing in farmers’ fields); “compensatory reproduction” describes the process by which species will increase their litters and broods to make up for numbers lost to mass culling. Roach always introduces interesting vocabulary and some of my favourite new words were: frass (insect excreta), snarge (the remains of a bird after it has collided with an airplane), kronism (the eating of one’s own offspring).
For centuries, people have killed trespassing wildlife — or brought in someone to do it for them — without compunction and with scant thought to whether it’s done humanely. We have detailed protocols for the ethical treatment and humane “euthanizing” of laboratory rats and mice, but no formal standards exist for the rodents or raccoons in our homes and yards. We leave the details to the exterminators and the “wildlife control operators,” the latter a profession that got rolling when the bottom dropped out of the fur market and trappers realized they could make better money getting squirrels out of people’s attics.
It’s probably not surprising that Roach comes down on the side of the animals everywhere they come in conflict with humans; not only are the critters just doing what critters do (and rarely are they doing as much harm to humans as the media likes to portray), but short of driving a species to extinction, we’re not very good at managing animal numbers or behaviours. This really isn’t the book I expected it to be (the subtitle about nature “breaking the law” is kind of misleading) but I enjoyed myself and learned some things; I will read Mary Roach again.
