16 minute read
Mary Roach
MARY ROACH: ANIMALS AMOK
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 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. 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
MARY ROACH: ANIMALS AMOK
PHOTO BY PIXELCREATURES/PIXABAY 54
crimes—but I could break it down; you get manslaughter, murder, home invasion and then the misdemeanors trespassing, jaywalking, littering. That seemed like I could structure the book that way and make it a little more fun and relatable than just saying human-wildlife conflict, which sounds kind of dry. PLATONI: So there’s kind of like an implied “allegedly” with animal crimes. When we say human-animal conflict, I keep thinking, Is it really a two-way street? Is it us projecting on them? ROACH: It typically turns out poorly for the animals, because ultimately public safety is going to be the priority. So if you have animals coming into your property or whatever it is, looking for food—if it’s an agricultural situation, they don’t have a lot of rights and it doesn’t typically go all that nicely. PLATONI: I was just thinking that animals, like you said, they’re kind of doing what animals do and they’re often doing what animals have always done. But we’re the ones who change all the time. We’re the ones who build stuff. We affect the climate. There’s 8 billion of us now, and it seems like we change and then they adapt and then we get mad at them, which is just gaslighting. ROACH: Exactly. Our range is expanding and their range—talking about bears, some of these large mammals that in the last 100 years, the populations were decimated by bounties, by airdrops of poison meat; I mean, it’s kind of free-for-all annihilation campaigns. That all shifted around the middle of the last century when the environmental movement [and] the animal welfare movement started to gain traction and the public kind of shifted its attitude, and it wasn’t OK to just go in and wipe these animals out. So happily, they’ve made a recovery, these populations of bears and wolves and coyotes to the point where they’re now kind of getting all up in people’s business again and now we’re heading back into conflict.
But yeah, it’s almost always our change and our doing that is creating the conflict. Animals are just doing what they’ve always done. And now suddenly we’ve plunked down in the middle of their range, up in the mountains around Aspen, just sort of providing new sources of food and entire dumpsters behind restaurants full of sustainably grown and lovely organic produce for them to feast upon. So why wouldn’t they? So yeah, it is very much our fault, in a sense. PLATONI: One of the things that’s really fascinating about this book is you get into the idea of what a pest and what’s an animal that we love and we want to protect. I think there must be at least 100 different animals in this book that are considered pests at some point in history, including a lot of animals I think of as being extremely adorable.
Did you ever find sort of a through line for what makes an animal a pest to us and what makes an animal something that we care about and we love [and] we want to bring into our home? ROACH: Oh, sure; pest is a term that gets applied by somebody who is either irritated or harmed by the animal or their bottom line is affected from agricultural pests. You know, agriculture—between the birds and the rodents, if you’re trying to grow food, those animals are considered pests. There’s lists of wildlife that are considered by the USDA or the Department of Public Health [to be pests]. There’s a long list. I’m like, “Really, chipmunks? Bobcats?” But depending on where they’re living and what they’ve decided to feed on or chew through in the case of rodents, they end up causing somebody headaches and then they become a pest. PLATONI: Here are some of the species the EPA and the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services consider pests: chipmunks, bears, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, skunks, flying squirrels, tree squirrels, little brown bats, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, cliff swallows, crows, house finches, turkey vultures, black vultures and mute swans. ROACH: And that is not a comprehensive list at all. That’s just a few of them. We seem to be irritated by just about
everything out there. PLATONI: So the solution to pests and pest eradication is, of course, science. I feel like we can read this book sort of as a history of technological innovation and pest eradication. So you sort of take us through the pre-World War II era, where it was mostly brute force and trickery—you know, sending somebody into a field to do something startling. And then in the ’50s and the ’60s [it was] more about mass poisoning. It’s the era of better living through chemistry. And then more recently, there’s all these kind of high tech things. There’s drones, lasers. ROACH: Yeah, if you look at the timeline of military technology, it’s amazing. Pest control and military weapons kind of have followed this parallel path, even to the extent of the National Wildlife Research Laboratories—there were two of them back then—working together and during World War II with the Division Nine, which was The National Defense Research Committee, if I have that correct. So the two of them [were] actually working hand-in-hand in the Division Nine. . . .
So the people in chemical weapons were making suggestions for the wildlife people, because what happened during World War II [is that] those supplies that were necessary to make rat poisons were cut off. So the wildlife people were looking for a substitute.
So like, “Hey, you guys in the chemical warfare division, what do you got that’s maybe too nasty to use in human warfare? Could we try it out?” So there was interesting cooperation between the two. And then there was the chemical era and then the drones and the lasers.
The end point that I would love to see for both of those is coexistence, and in the wildlife world, we are seeing organizations that are promoting that and they’re actively trying to bring both sides together to have conversations and to listen to each other and try to understand the issues. That is really hopeful for me. So if they are both on a parallel path, I’m like, Maybe that’ll be the case with warfare too. Maybe coexistence; maybe we’ll all get along. PLATONI: I was wondering if you could give us a couple examples of these technical solutions to animal control. And I was wondering if you might pick one that you thought worked out pretty well and then one that was just absolutely a bomb. ROACH: Well, the one that I like very much is in the jaywalking chapter, and the creatures that are jaywalking are ungulates [hoofed, typically herbivorous mammals], deer. There is a tremendous number of people who are injured, not so much when they hit the deer, but they swerve to avoid the deer. Not good for the deer and not good for drivers. And so I spent some time with a researcher who was trying to figure out the deer-in-the-headlights issue: They stand there and they look at the headlights and they don’t get out of the way.
Why is that and how can we help them?
He explained to me why they do. The theory behind why they just stand there has to do with how animals perceive cars and cars moving toward them. If you’re a deer, a large thing coming towards you—it’s a predator. And how you deal with predators is you look at it and you watch as it comes toward you, it gets bigger, it looms, and then you are able to intuit and sort of calculate how much time you have to get out of the way before you’re going to get hit. But at night, when it’s just two points of light in the distance, they don’t loom perceptively. The deer is kind of going, there’s two bright lights there. And boom. It’s very hard just to see; it’s hard for the animal to process that that is a thing coming closer.
So the idea that this guy, Travis DeVault of the National Wildlife Research Center, had was to install an aftermarket light bar on the front of a car or truck that illuminates the grille on the front of the car. So now the animal can see this is not just two little pinpoints of light, it’s a vehicle getting bigger coming toward you. And that has seemed to help. It’s just been patented and it’s not for sale yet. But I liked that it was just somebody actually sort of thinking about, Why does an animal do that?
A lot of the best solutions come out of a deeper understanding of the animal’s sensory system, the animal’s behavior. Is it a predator or is it a prey animal? How does it behave and why? So wildlife biology plays into these things quite a bit. So I thought that was a nice one. PLATONI: And did he consider changing the color of the light to? ROACH: He did, yes. It emits in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which is where deer see best. Deer can see really well at dusk. For them, it’s like high noon, because they’ve got more receptors in that in that area and less so on the red-orange. So they’re able to perceive somebody sneaking up on them—a predator. That is because whereas you and I would be like, “It’s kind of murky out there,” the deer can see just fine. PLATONI: That was a very smart solution. ROACH: Yeah. He mentioned how laundry detergents have these brightening agents that make “whiter whites.” What they are really is in the ultraviolet range. So if you as a hunter wash your camo gear in one of these detergents that makes whiter whites, you’re actually sort of glowing for the deer. PLATONI: OK, so give me one that just didn’t work out. ROACH: There’s a bunch of those in the category of, OK, we have this nuisance animal and we’d like to be rid of it. Why
don’t we import a predator that will go around and just scarf up all of these annoying animals? The simple example: Hawaii had rats in the sugar cane fields, [so they] brought mongeese. But someone overlooked the fact that the rat is nocturnal and the mongoose is diurnal. So the mongoose are like, “I hear there’s rats here somewhere, but I’ve never actually seen one.”
New Zealand has had a heck of a time with that going back to when people emigrated from Europe to New Zealand. There were these acclimatization societies that would bring in animals to kind of make the woods more familiar. Or they wanted deer to hunt, because they like to hunt. So they imported animals.
One of the things they imported was rabbits, and rabbits, as they had no land predators, just multiplied like crazy and were just devouring the fields and crops. So those good people decided, “Well, let’s bring in some stoats,” because they are a vicious predator; they can take on an animal larger than themselves. So they imported all these stoats and also bred some feral cats—and stole cats from people in the cities. But they let them go in the countryside, and the stoats looked around, saw the rabbits, [but it was] a lot easier to just pick these nice eggs that these strangely flightless birds are laying all over the place. So the number of species that are gone or endangered or threatened, not just birds, but reptiles too, is staggering, because the stoats have thrived really well.
They’ve also brought in possums to establish a fur trade; plus the rats that jump off the ships. So these land masses that had no natural predators for these birds now are kind of overrun. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s always those unknown knowns, unknown unknowns? What is it [Donald] Rumsfeld said? PLATONI: Known unknowns? Anytime your solution is a possum, I think you’re just headed for trouble.
In all of this innovation between different ways of eradicating pests, are we slowly moving toward improvement in any dimension? Are we getting more humane? Are we getting better at killing the animal we mean to and not everything else? ROACH: Well, there’s technology going on in the realm of genetics, something called gene drive. That’s something where, say you were to do this in New Zealand, [on] some of those islands that have seabirds but also rodents and the rodents are killing all the seabirds. So rather than dropping a hail of poison, they’re talking about doing something where you would make a genetic modification such that the animal only gives birth to males, so no females. Also, the gene drive element is that it would be passed on much more quickly, so all the offspring would have this. That would quickly lower the population, but first you have to kind of flood the island with these gene drive specimens, so initially you’re going to kind of make the problem worse. They will probably do a poison campaign and then introduce the gene drive animals as a kind of mop up and prevention going forward.
For an isolated island somewhere like that, I could kind of see that. What makes me a little uncomfortable is that list you read out of all these animals that are considered pests. If the decision is made purely according to what is most damaging to agricultural production, then that’s a frightening thing, because there are so many species that find it convenient to take the produce or [at] a fish farm, you got the cormorants that are taking the fish. Where would it even end?
On the Kaiser Permanente Terrace at The Commonwealth Club’s waterfront headquarters, San Francisco Mayor London Breed welcomed Distinguished Citizens Award honorees and other guests to the Club’s pre-gala luncheon November 19, 2021. (Photo by Sara Gonzalez/peopletography.com.)
Understanding the Civil Rights Movement
March 27 - April 3, 2022
• Join a life-changing trip to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis,
Birmingham,Selma and Montgomery with Judge LaDoris Cordell. • Visit important sites of the movement, from Selma’s Edmund Pettus
Bridge to Little Rock High School. • Meet with many figures who were involved, such as 16th Street Baptist
Church bombing survivor Dr. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford.
• Experience the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.
• Meet with members of the Equal Justice Initiative and learn about the work that is being done today to fight racial injustices in the legal system.
• Explore the Mississippi Delta, tour Malaco Records and the B.B. King Museum.
Cost: $4,195 per person, based on double occupancy
Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell (Ret.)
Discussion Leader LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, a 1974 graduate of Stanford Law School, was the first lawyer to open a law practice in East Palo Alto. In 1978, she was appointed Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at Stanford Law School where she implemented a successful minority admissions program. In 1982, she was appointed to the Municipal Court of Santa Clara County. In 1988, Judge Cordell became the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court in northern California. In 2001, she retired from the bench and was appointed Vice Provost at Stanford University. From 2010-2015, she was the Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose. Judge Cordell has been an on-camera legal analyst for CBS-5 television and a guest commentator on Court TV and a frequent moderator and contributor to Commonwealth Club programs.
