Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

“What if we accepted that risk? What if we chose to live not only with the occasional bear in the kitchen but with the likelihood that someone at some point will be killed by one of those bears? Planes are allowed to operate even though every now and then they crash and people die.”

Roach uses hypothetical questions—a common rhetorical technique in the book—to provoke deeper thought in her reader. Conflict bears and bears that repeatedly break into people’s houses are killed to reduce the likelihood of another violent encounter. Given that some people do not want to take steps toward making their homes more bear-resistant and that we accept risk in other parts of our lives, the author wonders why our tolerance toward animals is so low.

“Whatever you do in this life, stay away from an inebriated bull elephant in musth.”

Bull elephants are loners and usually the most dangerous. When they are in musth, they have raised testosterone, which makes them more aggressive. Elephants also seek out alcohol, and because they lack the enzyme to break down ethanol, they can become drunk easily. Just as with humans, the chance of aggression, violence, and accidents increases dramatically.

“Meanwhile, you do what you can to reduce the heavy footfall of humanity: keep working to restore forests and set aside preserves.”

As people cut down timber and expand farms and villages, elephants lose their habitats and safe migratory passages, which brings them into conflict with people more and more often. The same is true for wild animals throughout the world: Habitat loss and the destruction of wilderness gives animals fewer options for survival, highlighting The Impact of Urbanization.

“Measures that seem intuitively obvious are, in practical fact, limited—by their expense and by the new problems they create.”

This quotation echoes a recurring concept in the book. Here, it is applied to using electric fences to keep out elephants, which seems like a good idea until one factors in the expensive maintenance and necessary calibration to affect an elephant without electrocuting it, as well as the fact that some elephants have learned to use wood to push down the wires. The sentiment also applies to the translocation of any wild animal.

“Feeding wild animals, as we know, is the quickest path to conflict. The promise of food motivates normally human-shy animals to take a risk. The risk-taking is rewarded, and the behavior escalates. Shyness becomes fearlessness, and fearlessness becomes aggression.”

While the book tends to focus on humans harming animals, bad outcomes can come from good intentions. One of the factors in India’s monkey problem is that people feed the monkeys because they are representatives of the god Hanuman in Hinduism. This, unfortunately, habituates the monkeys to people and they learn to associate humans with sources of food.

“Females that don’t become pregnant will quickly cycle into heat again, and each time they do, males will respond with breeding-season behavior. Meaning they’re more aggressive more of the time—not only toward other macaques but, it’s believed, toward humans.”

One of the issues with birth control approaches to the monkey problem in India is that unless the females are completely sterilized, which is a costly and difficult endeavor, they will go into heat. The problems with aggressive males are, therefore, aggravated. This example highlights the problem with many Mitigation Efforts in the Human-Animal Conflict, which decontextualize animal behaviors.

“I envy people able to read the natural world in this way. I move through the woods the way I flip through Chinese editions of my books, seeing shapes and patterns and having no clue what they might mean.”

The author follows a professional tracker on the trail of mountain lions to count them and assess the health of the animals. She uses a metaphor to highlight his intelligence, as well as her own inexperience. Comparing animal sign to a human language also collapses the hierarchy between What We Choose to Protect or to Kill, stressing how animals not only have their own ways of communication but that people can understand them if they try. She is amazed not only by the tracker’s ability to notice the signs but also how he can tell species and genders apart. Moreover, some of the signs indicate an animal’s speed, motive, and direction.

“Naturalists were the original biologists, and hunters and trappers were the original naturalists. No one knew more about a species—the wheres, whens, and whys of its movements through the land and the seasons, its relationships with prey and rivals and mates—than a person whose livelihood depended on that knowledge.”

What strikes the author as a paradox makes sense when considered in a more practical light: Those who understand nature best are those who spend the most time in it and have the most to gain or lose from their understanding. Several of the naturalists and biologists she meets are also hunters.

“The future of turd science is bright. Analyzing genetics from scat promises to be a faster, less costly version of capture-mark-recapture.”

Old methods of counting mountain lions in an area involved trapping some and marking them, then trapping again, and performing an equation of the new animals versus marked to estimate total numbers. Skilled sign cutters can explore an area for sign and, with knowledge of animal behavior, estimate from there. However, the easiest and most accurate method involves examining scat for DNA markers. Roach defuses the repulsiveness in examining feces through humor, referring to “turd science.”

“What a Douglas fir does, it does very slowly, and that includes dying. Possibly the least attractive feature of a nine-hundred-year life span is the century or two spent dying. Decomposition drags on for another hundred years or so. A tree is the rare organism to which the comparative deader is often and accurately applied.”

Roach uses incorrect grammar—“deader”—to emphasize her point about Douglas Firs. The lifecycles of some trees are counted in centuries. To the uninformed observer, a very tall tree that is actually dead or dying may look completely fine. These trees, however, if located near where people go, pose a risk of dead material falling on them.

“The term ‘danger tree’ is itself somewhat hilarious. It’s like ‘danger mitten.’”

It’s not just tall, dying trees that are dangerous; it’s also trees that bear heavy pinecones or fruit. However, people don’t associate the word “tree” with “danger,” so signs warning people of the danger are often ineffective or regarded as humorous.

“We seem to be drawn to extremes: huge, tall, loud. It’s the pull of awe. It’s one reason we care about whales and not sprat, why people hug trees and step on clover.”

People seem to care more for species that are either large and majestic, like polar bears and very old Douglas pines, or smaller and cute, like penguins. The author argues that using such superficial criteria to determine what is worth protecting is irrational and often doesn’t take into account other, less charismatic players in an ecosystem. She uses juxtaposition to emphasize this point, contrasting very different organisms to highlight their shared trait: life.

“In other words, it’s not beans. It’s plants, period. If you can’t flee or maul or fire a gun, evolution may help you out with other, quieter ways to avoid being eaten.”

Plants are underestimated in terms of their lethality. Many common yard, house, and garden plants contain lethal phytotoxins. While Roach has emphasized size’s role in a creature being considered valuable or dangerous, she pulls in the opposite direction here, pointing out quiet, unassuming dangers.

“If you’re trying to build some cred in terrorist circles, it sounds better to say you’re making ricin than to say you’re trying to extract something from a rhododendron.”

The author wonders why things like kidney beans or crotons are not more widely used by criminals and terrorists, given that they’re more commonly available. One expert states that part of the reason is that ricin and abrin already have reputations, unlike lilies-of-the-valley, for instance. Humor defuses a touchy topic here.

“Warfare and pest control long strolled hand in hand. Both, after all, seek to destroy grouped adversaries as efficiently as possible.”

The US military experimented with using ricin and other toxins against enemy armies during times of warfare. When the ricin experiments were unsuccessful, the government turned the toxin over to pest control researchers to combat rats and other pests. The comparison between warfare and pest control puts humans and animals on a level playing field, marking both as brutal.

“Killing one or two million of the seventy million blackbirds that descend on the northern plains each year is like trying to solve global warming with an ice machine.”

With the help and approval of state wildlife departments, farmers conducted large campaigns to kill the birds taking some of their grain and seeds. They used bombs and poisons. However, the amount of birds killed, though it seems high, did not noticeably affect their populations. Roach uses an absurd metaphor to highlight this futility.

“Hell-bent on reproduction, the deer fail to note the most blatant obstacle to the successful onward advancement of their genes: traffic.”

Mating season is one of the most dangerous times for deer and the motorists who hit them. It is difficult for deer to estimate the approximate speed and distance of oncoming cars, and when their biological imperative urges them to cross roads, the result can be deadly for them.

“For long-lasting fear, birds need to see or hear some consequences.”

One of the main problems with frightening devices for birds is that they soon learn that it is a false alarm. They then return to the same areas, sometimes within minutes. Effigies seem to have longer-lasting effects, as they may signal to the birds that one of their flock had a deadly encounter and that they should stay away to avoid the same fate.

“But that’s a survival strategy. All of this is. It’s about keeping fed, protecting one’s progeny, escorting the genes to the next generation. It’s gulls being gulls and, unfortunately in some cases, trying to do it too close to people being people.”

The basic motivations of wildlife do not differ drastically from those of humans, at the core. However, when any wild animal acts in accordance with its instincts and those actions happen near humans behaving as humans do, conflict arises. Competition for space and resources is part of it.

Let’s take the example of Canada geese on golf courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf. Littering. For this, should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into a hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the Holy Sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese!”

The author’s frustration with people killing animals to continue their frivolous pursuits is shown here. The environmental impact of golf courses is certainly much higher than that of geese, but the geese are killed for not knowing that the greens and ponds of golf courses are not for them. Roach uses hypothetical questions to highlight this absurdity.

“I don’t mean to imply that adorable, showy species are of more value or somehow deserving of more concern. It’s just…damn.”

As much as the author decries people’s irrational preference for charismatic species, she acknowledges that she is susceptible to those same leanings. At first, she feels that every measure should be taken to save the adorable yellow-eyed penguin, but when she sees how equally adorable the invasive brushtail possum is, she reconsiders. She portrays herself as speechless, emphasizing the creature’s emotional impact as well as the irrationality behind preserving cute creatures over ugly ones.

“Humaneness, in the context of a lethal trap, is a function of speed: speed of death, yes, but more critically, speed to unconsciousness—to feeling and knowing nothing.”

New Zealand has mandates on pest control devices being humane. Rendering the victim irreversibly unconscious before any painful spasms occur is how to accomplish that if instant death isn’t achievable. However, to outside observers who are unaware of the consciousness level of the target animal, it may look painful.

“Without ever uttering the words, he’s practicing coexistence and biocontrol. The feed he loses to rodents and birds is part of the cost of doing business. Perhaps the model should be shoplifting. Supermarkets and chain stores don’t poison shoplifters; they come up with better ways to outsmart them.”

The feedlot owner interviewed at the end of the book uses biological methods of pest control (allowing owls and foxes, for instance, to exist on his property) to keep the abundant mice in check. He also allows for loss as a normal operating procedure. Less impactful approaches like these, including using exclusionary items like fences, and cultural practices like changing what plants are grown, are part of an Integrated Pest Management framework that seeks to do the least harm. Roach uses an analogy here to compare crime mitigation to pest control, once again elevating animals to the same level as humans.