MARY ROACH SAYS
the greatest number of repeat criminal offenders are outside, all around us, and you’ve probably even seen some today—animals. It has only been three centuries since animals had to stand trial for their misconduct, in a court of law, with legal representation. How can humans and animals get along in the modern world? From the September 21, 2021, Inforum program “Mary Roach’s Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.” MARY ROACH, Author, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law KARA PLATONI, Science Editor, Wired—Moderator
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KARA PLATONI: I know it is the tradition in interviews like these where you have to ask the author if they had some big, dramatic events that gave them the idea for this book, but since chapter one is about bear attacks— God, I hope not. MARY ROACH: [Laughter.] Yeah, I know. I wish I had the tidy and dramatic origin story, like I was raised by wolves or attacked by raccoons savagely in my backyard. But I’ve pretty much had fairly peaceful co-existence with wildlife. I got interested in this [when] I’d finished one book and I was just doing that protracted grasping and groping where you’re like, “What am I doing next?” I often write about the human body, and I felt like I’ve kind of used that up. There’s only so much turf, so many parts and there’s only so many Roachable parts. So I was kind of looking a little further afield. I went up to the National Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, because I thought there might be a book that might go around something that I’d heard about, which was there’s a woman up there who established a hair library of all these endangered species.
THE COMMO N WE AL TH | December 2021/January 2022
So it’s not just one hair, but the guard hairs and the fluff hairs on the regular coat and the whiskers. Just the idea of a hair library appealed to me. She was also the author of a guide for wildlife crime professionals on how to detect counterfeit versus real tiger penis. So she was an interesting character. When I was there, the director of the lab said, “You [say you] want to tag along on an investigation and see how everything happens? No, no, absolutely not. If it’s an open case, legally, you cannot, and that’s that.” So I regrouped and I started thinking, Well, what if you turned it around? What if the wildlife was the perpetrator? And in that case, the science is the humanwildlife conflict. . . . Then I came upon this 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, which is an insane 400-page, very bizarre, book, but I realized I could do this. I could set it up by crime. So I’ve got initially the felony crimes—and “crimes” with quotation marks, because obviously animals are just following their instincts, not literally committing
ROACH PHOTO BY JEN SISKA; BEAR PHOTO BY REINCARNATION40/PIXABAY; GULL PHOTO BY COCOPARISIENNE/PIXABAY.
MARY ROACH: A
