Ep 103: Pest-o, change-o: how culture shapes our view of animal commensals (with Bethany Brookshire)
What makes a pest? Why are some animals revered in one culture and vilified in another? How do our ways of life bring us into conflict versus companionship, and what do these interactions mean for us and them?
Rats, squirrels, coyotes, pigeons...often, we view animals like these as pests. We usually don't like them, even try to get rid of them…but what makes a species a pest? On this episode, we talk with Bethany Brookshire about her new book, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. Bethany is a science journalist interested in human-animal conflict, and in the book, she tells the story of how both historical and cultural context explains why the same animal species can be viewed as a friend or foe.
Bethany is also the host of the podcast Science for the People - check them out!
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
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SPEAKERS
Marty Martin, Bethany Brookshire, Cameron Ghalambor
Cameron Ghalambor 00:08
Do you like mice? Of course you don't.
Marty Martin 00:10
Those are the words of Clarence Cook Little, the founder of the Jackson Laboratory are JAX, as it's also known. JAX now breeds 12,000 strains of mice for various types of research and sells more than 3 million of them per year including the C57/BL6 and DBA lines he developed.
Cameron Ghalambor 00:29
Little’s original interest in mice derives from his focus on cancer. Little is famous for leading the switch from studying cancer as a largely infectious disease to a genetic disease, with his greatest scientific contribution being called the ‘five laws of transplant immunology’.
Marty Martin 00:45
Little also served as the president of the University of Maine and later the University of Michigan, but he's as well known for his infamous activities as well as his noble work.
Cameron Ghalambor 00:54
Like many geneticists of his day, Little was a big advocate of eugenics, including serving a short stint as president of the American Eugenics Society for decades. He also championed the perspective that smoking cigarettes did not cause cancer, at least not in most casual smokers.
Marty Martin 01:10
Clarence Cook Little thus resembles many giants in biology's pasts - complex people who contributed a lot of positives to their field, while also holding ideas that today we now know as unethical and unscientific.
Cameron Ghalambor 01:23
But back to Little's mice, and the founding of JAX.
Marty Martin 01:26
Little argued in a 1935 Scientific American article that mice would be ideal for lab research, especially genetics, because most people consider them pests. Why not breed hordes of mice and do what you want with them if the majority of people don't like them in the first place.
Cameron Ghalambor 01:41
And so exploded the use of mice and biomedical research. What were once just nuisances,
Marty Martin 01:47
And maybe occasional reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens,
Cameron Ghalambor 01:47
Became one of the most powerful tools ever developed in biology. So, should we see them as pests?
Marty Martin 01:50
This question is core to the new book of our guest today, Bethany Brookshire, who is also the host of the podcast Science for the People. Bethany's book, entitled Pests: how humans create animal villains, tells an engaging story about the history of our interactions with a subset of particular species.
Cameron Ghalambor 02:11
I live in Norway, so it's pretty rare for me to encounter a cane toad or a Burmese python. But even in parts of the world where these species have occurred for millennia, these organisms either present no problem to native species, or no more problem than other relatively large predatory species with plenty of natural enemies to keep their populations in check.
Marty Martin 02:31
But for Floridians like me, these two species alone are the reasons I can't let my little dog off his leash when we hike in the Everglades. Okay, Loki is probably too big to be eaten by a Python, but he's not too big, and he's very much too dumb to avoid eating a cane toad and especially the lethal toxin filled parotid glands on the back of its head.
Cameron Ghalambor 02:51
The theme of Bethany's book, pest, depends on context. One person's creepy crawly is another person's inspiration.
Marty Martin 02:59
I'm Marty Martin.
Cameron Ghalambor 03:00
And I'm Cameron Ghalambor.
Marty Martin 03:01
And this is Big Biology. Bethany, thank you so much for coming on Big Biology today, we're really excited to talk to you as a fellow podcaster and a fellow fan of pests. But before we get into that book of the same name, tell us about how you got into this topic. You were a host of the science for the people podcast, did some experience from that podcast inspire you to write the book?
Bethany Brookshire 03:34
Sadly, no. It was an experience actually, from my work as a journalist. It's actually in the book, the story that got me inspired. I was reporting on a study in 2016 from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that mice it was a study of ancient mouse teeth, showing that mice Mus musculus had been associated with humans, since the earliest days of permanent architecture, permanent or semi permanent architecture. And I just became so fascinated by the idea that we've had house mice since we had houses, I just I loved it. And that was before we had agriculture, we had permanent housing, we were settled pretty permanently before we started farming. And I just love that so much that these animals had immediately seen what we were setting up and been like, huh, that looks good. And I just love that.
Marty Martin 04:34
So that isn't necessarily mouse as pest, right? That's mouse as cohabits her. I mean, maybe maybe somebody people could read that as passed, and it's definitely viewable as pets and you write about them that way. But how did you make that experience? How do you take that as a turn towards writing a book on other things, the pest connotation from that pests for mouse and pests generally.
Bethany Brookshire 04:57
Yeah. So I became fascinated by that story. And then I started looking at the examples of other animals, who had just been living with us kind of in association with us not domestics, but commensals, right. And I became really interested in all of these animals that were kind of making it with us. And I especially became interested in the fact that most of the time when animals are making it with us, we hate them. We hate their success so much. And I love that for us. So I just became really fascinated as to these animals are literally successful, when we often kill everything around us. And yet, we hate them. And I became really interested in asking why why we hate the animals that we do.
Cameron Ghalambor 05:48
Well, that might be a good segue into telling us a little bit about Kevin. So you, you start off the book. So I guess for the listeners, the official title of the book is Pests: how humans create animal villains. And you start off talking about Kevin or maybe more accurately effing Kevin, can you tell us a little bit about who Kevin was? And how Kevin sort of inspired you as part of the writing the book?
Bethany Brookshire 06:24
Yeah, so I was gonna ask if we can cuss on this podcast. We call him freaking Kevin. Fucking Kevin. Effing Kevin. Currently, when we're outdoors, we mostly call him just Kevin because there's a three year old who lives next door. So gotta keep it G rated. But yeah, so Kevin persists. There are many Kevins in my yard. Kevin is an Eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. And I will have you know that currently, Kevin is setting up family life again for the spring. And there's a bunch of very stupid teen squirrels wandering around my backyard making stupid teen squirrel mistakes. But yes, Kevin is one of the reasons that my garden has failed for the past five or six years. And it's because he steals all of my tomatoes. He comes when the tomatoes are green, and plump and pretty. And he picks one and he takes a big bite. And then he recalls that he doesn't like tomatoes. And he leaves it on the porch for me with a little bite mark in it. Just so I know. And then the next day, he does it again. And again, every day. Yes, and I have done many things. I now have a full gardeners crop cage to protect my plants, which also ended up being surrounded by chicken wire and lined with bricks. To stop Kevin. Yeah, and to be clear, there's more than one Kevin Kevin is kind of the collective name for all of the squirrels in my yard there are about I don't know six or seven Kevins I'm absolutely sure that at least one of them is female.
Marty Martin 08:06
I think it's a good bet.
Bethany Brookshire 08:07
Kevin is a gender neutral name.
Marty Martin 08:10
Kevin is a great example, and the mice you talked about just a minute ago, I think what sets your book apart from other things on on pests, other other book type treatments on pests, is that you're really trying to focus on the human perspective that, pest in the form of conflict with people and maybe sometimes the conflicts we create, I want to quote something that you wrote to capture that, as western societies walled themselves off from the natural world, its denizens fall into two camps, the ones we rarely see. And the ones we see too much. The rare animals get appreciation, they're beautiful, natural, and usually far away. The common ones, on the other hand, are so common that in the best case, our eyes pass right over them. In the worst case, they intrude on our consciousness and our lives, like Kevin, that was my add, they become pests. So why do we feel that these some of these species are pests and others not? I mean, where does this kind of dichotomization, these ideas about pests come from?
Bethany Brookshire 09:08
Oh, there's so many answers to that question.
Marty Martin 09:10
There's a book on that, I think, a whole book on that topic.
Bethany Brookshire 09:15
Yeah, I mean, I explored that question through five different themes in the book. So I explored kind of like, why we might look at an animal and say, Oh, that's a pest. I hate it. And so one of the themes is like fear and disgust. Sometimes we look at animals and we're disgusted by them, or we fear them. And we're much more likely to call those animals a pest. Another example is niche, niche. Niche?
Marty Martin 09:43
Take your pick.
Bethany Brookshire 09:44
I always wonder. I've been in groups of people where it's team niche niche and one words team niche. I'm gonna compromise team niche.
Marty Martin 09:52
That's good. All right, good.
Bethany Brookshire 09:55
So anyway, there are animals that come into niches that we we create in our ecosystems because of course we are, as humans create ecosystems where we live. And these animals come into the niches that we create. And sometimes we deliberately create niches that allow those animals to thrive. So that was like the second theme. The third theme was belief, we often see animals through the lens of our own beliefs about them. And so a good example of that is cats, we believe certain things about cats that live with us. The other example that I use is elephants. And then the fourth theme was power, we often are very quick to judge and by judge, I mean to kill animals that threaten our sense of control over our environments. And the last theme is habitat, and habitat destruction and habitat construction. A lot of times we basically come into a habitat, we build a Walmart and a parking lot, and then we get surprised when the animals stay. We're like, you weren't, you weren't supposed to be here. And when the animals stay anyway, we start to call them pests. So I looked at all of those kinds of different angles. And each has something to say about why we might call an animal a pest, but there's no kind of one definition, I would say.
Cameron Ghalambor 11:25
Yeah, well, I I'd like to talk about cats.
Bethany Brookshire 11:30
Everybody wants to talk about cats.
Cameron Ghalambor 11:32
So as a cat owner, and also somebody who, you know, studies birds, or I love my cat, it has never lived outside, it's always been an indoor cat because of our concern about the ecological impacts that cats have on wildlife around them. I thought it was really interesting how you sort of presented cats as like an example of a sort of species that is either beloved by some individuals or some cultures, and then also maybe vilified, or, you know, at least perceived negatively, by others. And so I guess one thing that I wasn't really, that I kind of wanted to get your opinion on was, how much of this is is just like an educational problem, in terms of, you know, those of us who are familiar with the, with the literature, and the research on how many birds are killed each year by cats, or lizards or other kinds of wildlife? We're very aware of this. And yet, some people are completely unaware of, of, you know, they they don't perceive their cats in that way. They may not be familiar with the, you know, with the scientific literature. Is it really a problem of education, like you talked about, for example, in Australia, there are active campaigns to eradicate feral cats. And that really wouldn't go over well, in the United States. I don't think. So is it education? Or is there something more? Is there? Is there another kind of deeper explanation at play? Or is it a combination of the two? I don't know.
Bethany Brookshire 13:21
Well, I would say also fellow cat lover, so I feel you I have two cats. Mine were actually both former ferals. I yanked them in from outdoors. And they are living very happily in my house. I think that's a really interesting and complex question. You know, I think we, as scientists, we as communicators, are often pretty quick to leap to like the deficit model and say, like, Oh, if only people knew about how much trouble these animals cause they would absolutely change what they think. And the reality is that, you know, and I know, the deficit model of science, education does not work. We know this. And it really, I think, comes down to what people value and what they've been taught to value. Right? I know numerous people I actually live very close to one who loves birds, feeds birds, has outdoor cats that hang out under the bird feeders all the time, and bring birds inside knows full well is a scientist and knows full well what cats do. So I think, you know, it has a great deal to do with kind of what people value a lot of people, honestly, you're going to ask them to choose between the cat that hangs out in their lap and a bird they probably can't identify, you know, I get I get why they might not make the same choice you would. And but it also has to do with kind of what the culture has taught you to value right. So you talked about Australia. Another really good example of this is New Zealand. So New Zealand is currently on its predator free 2050 campaign where they're basically trying to rid the country of every single predator that can eat all of the things that grew up in New Zealand and are therefore very dumb. And I think it's really interesting because the predator free New Zealand original list includes stoats, and like opossums and rats, like two different kinds of rats, it does not include cats. Even though cats are one of the most popular pets in New Zealand, I think they actually might be the most popular pet. People in New Zealand, love cats, they own cats, they firmly believe that it is in their cat's best interest to be allowed to roam. They feel that, you know, it is part of a cat being a cat and living it's best cat life. Even there are surveys of veterinarians in New Zealand, who say yeah, you have to let the cat out like otherwise, the cat is going to suffer psychologically. And at the same time, they do acknowledge the problems posed by feral cats, there was actually a lot of news coming through right now because there was a proposition for a yearly cat hunt for schoolchildren, in New Zealand, like literally go out kill cats.
Marty Martin 16:27
What a field trip that is.
Bethany Brookshire 16:29
In New Zealand, that is very common. You can it is a thing in New Zealand for schoolchildren to make rat traps, lethal ones, so why not cats. And so this was a thing, and then the backlash just got huge. Now, it's not a thing. It's it's a real combination of kind of knowing the harms and deliberate choices we make about what we believe to be more deserving of our attention. And that's not to say that one decision is better than another right? Like, I can't say that.
Marty Martin 17:02
Yeah, yeah. So Bethany, I mean, there's a paper 2016 paper by Philip Neihaus that takes a prominent place in the first part of your book. And it seems to sort of approach this issue from the place that I think Cam and I, our brains first go as ecologists, you know, we sort of think about pests first and foremost, that way, there's no question that the concept of pest is all the other dimensions, the social ones, such as we're talking about, but even within the ecological sense, one of his dimensions of thinking about pest is impact. Is there any kind of consensus of pests as impact? I mean, are there clear categories? Were there? How clear is it in simply the ecological space of what a pest is, and where things get a little more gray?
Bethany Brookshire 17:49
You know, it's absolutely not clear at all. Like, it's all subjective judgment. And the way I kind of approached it, and this gets at one of the distinctions that Philip Neihaus makes in his review, which I mean, if you're into that kind of scientific literature, highly recommend, super good, excellent reading, is the fact that you have to differentiate between a predator and a pest. Both of these animals have negative impacts, right. But the severity of those impacts kind of differs. So he actually describes it in terms of severity, I think of it in terms of a predator harms us, a pest harms our stuff, it harms the things we value. So the most classic definition of this is a crop pest, right, an insect or an animal, like a vertebrate that's getting into your crops and eating the food that you value. This can also be coyotes eating your livestock, wolves, eating your livestock, a coyote attacking your pet. These are all things that are attacking not you, but the things that you value. And this is where for example, we can come back to cats, right? That has to do with whether or not you value birds as your stuff. I'm using air quotes here your stuff, right? If you value birds as your stuff, then cats are pests preying on your stuff. And so I think the ideas that bring us close to animals are often again, they come back to values and one of my favorite examples of this is actually pigeons. Right? There are people in this world still who love pigeons, they compete them there are fancy pigeons, they have like big old feathers that like come out between their toes and stuff and like these big ruffs. And like there are some pigeons that when you throw them they tumble through the air. Oh my goodness pigeon throwing YouTube. Highly recommend and you know, that they really love of these birds, I met someone who would literally snuggle pigeons. And it was because she had a use for them. Right? She was close with them emotionally. It's amazing how you can quickly distance yourself when you no longer have a use for an animal. Right? It's real cold. But it's real true. You know, and we used to really value pigeons for what they did for us. They were great messengers, they were great food, they still are great food, they produced a lot of fertilizer, that sort of thing. We don't need that anymore. We have cell phones and chicken, and chemical fertilizer. And it was amazing to watch. There's actually this wonderful research that I highlight in the book from Colin Jerolmack, who I think is still at NYU, that tracked mentions of pigeons in the New York Times over about 100 year period. And during that period, they go from noble, innocent, beautiful, to rats with wings. And that 100 year period coincides with the loss of our use of the pigeon. And just as we use them less all of a sudden, we don't care. They're like the outdated cell phone of animals.
Marty Martin 21:18
The Flip Phone, wow.
Bethany Brookshire 21:20
Isn't that sad? It's awful, right? Like you can laugh about a flip phone. But then you're like, that's a bird.
Marty Martin 21:25
Yeah. Well, I do find them charming. But I'm a weirdo as biologists go in terms of being enamored about pests for different reasons. But you had to make so many choices when you were writing this book, though, because there are lots and lots of different pests out there. And you, one, chose to focus on vertebrate pests. And I would like to hear about why you did that. But even among the vertebrates, you know, there were only I guess you didn't want to write a 3,000 40,000 page book. But how did you pick the species that you did, there are pigeons in there, there's mice, raccoons, deer, we're gonna talk about some other ones. But how did you choose the ones that you did?
Bethany Brookshire 22:00
Yeah, so there's definitely a list like as long as my arm. And I totally would write a 3000 page book. But nobody wants to read that. Except me. I ended up actually choosing the animals that I did specifically, because of the themes that I talked about earlier, I was looking for scientific research that really highlighted those themes and could speak to those themes. And I would say many, many animals that we call pests would fit all of those themes. When you're writing what we like to call narrative journalism, which is what this book technically is, it sounds very highfalutin, you have to kind of combine the story that you're telling with the scientific research or the journalistic reporting that you have. And the reality is the reporting must always come first. Truth is more important than story. This causes a lot of writers a lot of pain, but it is very true. And so a lot of the animals that I picked I picked because they had the most research around them. So for example, I am minorly obsessed with feral pigs like and maybe not maybe not minorly, this is not low key, I am high key obsessed with feral pigs. They are so fascinating. But there's very little research on the ecology, the sociology, the psychology surrounding our treatment of feral pigs. They're just there just isn't. I actually talked to several wildlife biologists about this, maybe like, oh, yeah, nobody studies that. So, you know, there wasn't a body of research that I could really draw from.
Marty Martin 23:41
Wow, that's surprising. I mean, living in Florida, where they're so pervasive, it's really surprising to hear that there isn't more out there, besides, you know, the knee jerk response is get rid of them. And I think everybody's on board with that, but exactly what they do and, I don't know, I would have expected there be a big literature out there.
Bethany Brookshire 23:56
No, no, I think that's why right. It's the same reason that actually we know very little about the urban ecology of rats. We are only interested in how to kill them. Right. And the answer is helicopters with guns when it comes to pigs.
Marty Martin 24:12
Helicopters with guns for rats, that's uh.
Bethany Brookshire 24:16
Maybe drones like those little tiny quadcopters.
Marty Martin 24:18
Yeah, with tiny lasers and things. Yeah.
Bethany Brookshire 24:22
So yeah, but as for why vertebrates only it was mostly because I really want this book to make people think and think about why we treat animals the way we do, and maybe call into question some of our knee jerk responses. And the reality is, you can't do that for cockroaches. You can't. Nobody like, it's a hard sell. To be like cockroaches are so fascinating, you guys. They're very important ecologically. You can't, people are gonna they're not going to have a moment of sympathy. For the roach.
Cameron Ghalambor 25:00
I want to quickly go back to pigeons cause I want to communicate a story that I used to tell when I taught ornithology, and we talked about navigation. One of the most famous pigeons was this pigeon Cher Ami, that saved groups during World War I and it's just the classic sort of war movie scene where soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines and they're getting shot at and they have their passenger pigeon that they put the little note in its leg and it flies through the bullets and makes it to the other side after it's been blinded and, Poor Cher Ami, he was shot to heck yeah, he came through with like, one leg it was it was rough. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, that's, that's a heroic, that's maybe the most heroic pigeon that we have, you know, historically. And now, as you said, you know, pigeons are sort of looked looked down upon, but, you know, even when you read the Origin of Species, Darwin talks extensively about about pigeons and, and pigeon breeding was such a popular, you know, thing for everybody to do at the time. And so, but, but that also kind of makes me think that a lot of these attitudes that we have about, about our animals that we interact with, is also kind of fluid. And so it's, it's not always just that, you know, our perceptions stay grounded, you know, and don't change they, they do evolve, and and as, as cultures change, and environments change, it seems like our attitudes do as well.
Bethany Brookshire 27:05
Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point. And it's one that I kind of tried to highlight through the book is kind of how people can change their views over time. Pigeons are a great example of this of people who used to love pigeons. My favorite story from that is that Darwin's editor, when he submitted On the Origin of Species was like, this evolution stuff is fine, but I mean, have you considered just writing like a pigeon book? People are really into pigeons right now, so? I love that so much.
Marty Martin 27:35
So pigeons are pretty amazing. But let's put a challenge to you, Bethany. Can you convince listeners about how amazing rats are? If you're able to do that, I think you've really done a task. Tell us about the Karni Mata temple, and how you know different different cultures have very different perspectives on one of the, you know, the first thing that I think comes to everybody's mind when you say pest is rat. So what's the Karni Mata temple?
Bethany Brookshire 27:59
Especially if you're living in New York City right now? Yeah. everybody's obsessed. Yeah, so I sadly Karni Mata is one of the places I was not able to go for reporting because of COVID, but the Karni Mata temple, it's about eight hours northwest of New Delhi, I believe. And it is home to around 25,000 black rats and like when I say around, I mean, it's more that you can then you can count. So it's a lot. They say 25,000. And these are Rattus rattus. And these rats are sacred. They are their holy symbols, because they are believed to be reincarnated people. And so the rats are worshipped, they are well treated, they receive sacrifices. They used to allow people to, like bring in outside food to feed the rats. But now the rats receive a special diet because the people were bringing in too much junk food and the rats were not doing great.
Marty Martin 28:56
Yeah. And there's even a rat kitchen right?
Bethany Brookshire 28:58
There is, there;s a specialty rat kitchen. Yes. And what I found really fascinating about that is how contextual it was because I was speaking to, I got to speak to some people who worshiped at the temple. And there was one guy he goes every day he worships at this temple. His mother actually renamed him Karni after he survived a childhood illness. So he's named in honor of the goddess who was honored at that temple. And he goes pretty much every day. He allows the rats to crawl on him and like, all this kind of stuff. And then I said, Well, you know, how do you feel about the rats in your house? And he was like, Oh, I hate rats. They're awful. Because the rats in the temple are not rats. There's something else. There are symbols of reincarnated humans. And I think that context is really important to kind of how we view those animals. But as for like, loving rats, I know people who have pet rats, I myself have worked with rats. They are, if you're going to choose to work with rats or mice, behaviorally, choose rats. Because they, I mean, the reality is mice don't like you. They don't, they're never going to like you. I appreciate their honesty. But you're never going to make a friend and a mouse. A rat, a rat wants to snuggle, it wants to play, it wants to hang out. They are incredibly smart. They are incredibly charming. And you know, so there are people there are fancy rat shows that you can do that, you know, pet rats, all this kind of stuff. And I think a lot of people don't appreciate rats because of the context in which they encounter them. Right? If you see a rat coming out of a sewer covered in God knows what, or emerging out of a trash can or jump scaring you in the night. These are not things that are conducive to liking.
Marty Martin 30:55
Well sure, and that whole, what was it called, Black Death thing. I mean, there are other things connected to rats that give them a bad name.
Bethany Brookshire 31:00
Oh yeah, Yersinia pestis.
Marty Martin 31:04
Leptospirosis, minor stuff, yeah.
Bethany Brookshire 31:06
I find that very funny. Because of course, people are like, Oh, rats, black death. And I'm like, oh, chickens. bird flu. We're still eating chicken.
Cameron Ghalambor 31:18
Well, so maybe that's a good way of contrasting the situation in New Zealand with the Maori's and the kiore I guess, or the kiore, the Pacific rat. Can you tell us a little bit about how, what that relationship is between humans and rats?
Bethany Brookshire 31:37
Yeah, so this is the Pacific rat. So it's Rattus exulans as opposed to Rattus rattus or Rattus norvegicus. So yeah, I was really lucky throughout this book, to be able to meet and learn from a lot of indigenous people from around the world. And mostly, this was via zoom, or phone or WhatsApp, things like that. But they were incredibly generous with their time and with me being really ignorant about things. But yes, I got to speak to several members of the Maori about how they see kiore. So when the Maori arrived in New Zealand, they actually brought kiore with them on purpose. And this is partially because rats are food to the Maori. And when I say food, I do not mean like snacks. They are fancy occasion, nice food, for celebrations, they are not of themselves of ritual significance, but they're like, signals of a, you know, special occasion. And so, the Maori used to really encourage these kiore in New Zealand, they would, for example, leave half of their garden, kind of unweeded, and that was for the kiore, right? They would plant specific things to encourage the kiore, there were areas where certain tribes had control of that area for the hunting of kiore in particular seasons, they're especially good apparently, there's one particular kind of fruit. And if the kiore eat a lot of this fruit, they become especially succulent. And so that was, you know, you had to have permission to hunt them at specific times and in specific places. And now, of course, the kiore are actually on the list for predator free 2050. And interestingly, one of the things I appreciate is that the government of New Zealand, which is the Maori name for that is Aotearoa have collaborated with the Maori to say, like, hey, you know, these rats are causing problems. And the Maori were like, yeah, yeah, we see the impact on biodiversity. And so they have negotiated to have a couple of islands that are kind of the kiore islands, where the kiore will be kind of farmed and not farmed, but encouraged and allowed to flourish while they are eradicated from other places, I found that that partnership kind of really interesting and also kind of a great way to compromise between kind of the biodiversity worries surrounding some of these animals and the belief systems surrounding them. Yeah. What's the history of the kiore? I mean, that how did it originally get to New Zealand? It's that's a long swim for most places. Oh, no, the Maori brought it. Yeah, it was on their, they they brought actually a bunch of things with them. They brought, you call these archaeologies called these cultural packages or food packages, which to me sounds like a little present. But they were they were not present. So they brought let's see, chickens. I believe they brought dogs. I believe they brought pigs. They brought kiore, sweet potato, and a couple of other plants that were kind of part of their agricultural package as they were spreading, and it's not just to New Zealand, they ended up bringing them all the way to places like Hawaii. So, yeah, this was this was part of that kind of Eastern expansion across the Pacific.
Cameron Ghalambor 35:17
But can you in terms of the the sort of ecological impact, my understanding is the kiore are smaller than Rattus rattus, the bigger black rat. And so there's, I think, interesting sort of interactions, ecological interactions between the the bigger, the bigger, sort of, you know, commonly perceived pest rat versus the kiore.
Bethany Brookshire 35:44
Bigger badder rats.
Cameron Ghalambor 35:46
Yeah. And then yeah, it sounds like a kind of a interesting and complex sort of ecological kind of interaction, can you? Can you talk a little bit more about how they interact with other rats in the environment?
Bethany Brookshire 36:01
Yeah, so I didn't. This is not my specialty. To be clear. I highly recommend researchers in New Zealand, if you want to want to talk about this more. But certainly, the kiore were the dominant rat on the island until the arrival of Europeans. At which point they brought Rattus rattus they, they brought Rattus norvegicus. And both of those, they're bigger, they're better, and Rattus exulans, the kiore was kind of exiled to the outer islands, where those rats do not co occur. There is acknowledgement though, that the kiore do have ecological impacts on their own. But those have, since the arrival of European colonization, just totally been outweighed by by the tide of other rats.
Marty Martin 36:48
Tide of rats, boy, another vivid example. So there's so much we could talk about with rats, but you have many different chapters in your books, and I want to make sure we hit a couple of the other pests. Next, I want to do maybe the most surprising pest I know it was surprising to one of my graduate students yesterday, we were talking about speaking. And I said to her, Bethany wrote a chapter on elephants as pests. And her eyes get really wide and said, Wait, what elephants as pests? So great example of, you know, cultural context, strongly influencing whether something is a pest. So tell us about elephants as pests, and maybe say a little thing a little bit about the really creative use of of apiculture, you know, putting bees around property and how that has some influence on management of elephant pests?
Bethany Brookshire 37:37
Well, I will only do that if in return, you can tell me your elephant story, because I have been told that you have one.
Marty Martin 37:43
Yes. Not the most exciting story in the world. But okay.
Bethany Brookshire 37:45
I want to know, though. Yeah, so it I found elephants really fascinating because we in the West, and by West, I mean, you know, developed subject to kind of Judeo Christian worldviews the global north, etc. We have this view of elephants as beautiful and wise. And, you know, super smart and cute. And like all this kind of stuff. And this is all true. I have been to Kenya I have met these elephants, they are adorable. They are amazing. They are inspiring. But African elephants kill about 200 people a year, they cause millions of dollars in crop damage. Asian elephants kill upwards of 800 people a year and cause millions of dollars in crop damages. I think we in the West often discount those losses, because we are not the ones experiencing them. You know, an elephant is big. When an elephant comes to eat your corn, it is not going to eat one corn, it is going to eat all of your corn and it's going to do it in one night. That's your entire crop for the season. And often people are killed or injured when they try to protect their crops from these elephants. And you know, it's reasonable for these elephants to want to have these this corn. It's right there corn is the snickers of elephant food. Like why would you not? And it's like literally growing right next to the national park in which they live. And so it was a really fascinating human wildlife conflict thing to explore. But yes, there are lots of efforts within Kenya in particular, to kind of protect elephants and people to prevent this conflict. And one of my favorites is the use of bees. Because Pliny the Elder used to say that elephants were afraid of mice. And that's like a, I think Disney perpetuated that myth. It's not true.
Marty Martin 39:58
Oh, yeah, that was in Dumbo. That was definitely in Dumbo.
Bethany Brookshire 40:00
It is not true elephants can't even really see mice like they're, it's hard to see. But bees, elephants do not like bees, especially African honeybees. And this is fair because African honeybees are SRS business. Oh my goodness. And so there's projects. The project that I looked at was the one developed by Save the Elephants, which is the elephants and bees project. And what they do is they work with farmers to erect beehive fences around their crops. And you create these nice beehives, you like put some like lemongrass in there create like a like a really nice feng shui sort of space, you know, add a little cage around it so the honey badgers can't get in, and you hope that like the bees come and live in your hive. And if they do, the hive is connected to a wire which runs around the property. And when an elephant comes, it shakes the wire, the bees come out. And the elephants are like, bye. And you would think that like elephants wouldn't have to worry about bees because elephants have skin that's like two centimeters thick. But that's not true. Because elephants also have eyes and the tips of their trunks and the areas around their mouths. And the bees. Can you imagine a bee up your trunk? My God?
Marty Martin 41:19
Yes. Obviously an Africanized bee of all things.
Bethany Brookshire 41:24
I'm gone, I'm gone. So this is really interesting, because now of course they're trying other things like you can't guarantee that the bees are going to move into the hives. These are not the European honey bee that we literally truck around by the billions in the United States. These are wild bees. And so if you can't get bees to move into your hives, a couple of the bee hive officers I was talking to were working with white noise machines, that kind of sound like bees. They were trying to drive away elephants with quadcopter drones, which kind of sounds like bees. And when in doubt, make it sound like a bee. I found this really fascinating. But it's this kind of really interesting kind of ongoing arms race between the elephants and the people because elephants very quickly figure out whether the beehives are inhabited. Whether that's actually a drone or a white noise machine. And if it is they're like, Well, no, I'm not fooled anymore. I'm gonna keep, no, you can't fool me with this. And so they're constantly kind of one upping each other. My personal favorite device is anything involving chili peppers. Basically, if animals in general learn to love spicy food, we are hosed. Like that, humans are done. Okay, like, if rats learn to love spicy stuff. Oh, we're done. We're done. So elephants don't love spicy things. So you can plant chili peppers. You can use chili balls which are chili peppers kind of put into a ball with like charcoal. And when you throw it at the elephant, it bursts. And they get coated in chili pepper. They do not like that. Or my personal favorite is this one guy was like, yeah, the quadcopter drone isn't working on its own. So we're gonna attach a can of chili spray to it. And then we'll just like hit a remote and it'll spray the chilies. I have not found out if they've gotten that to work yet.
Marty Martin 43:29
Let's talk about another dark pest issue, the four pests campaign in China. And what that meant to the great famine. So this was the brilliant one of the many brilliant ideas of Mao Zedong killing sparrows because he thought based on some of his advisers that they just ate too much grain. What happened? It led to, you know, big insect outbreaks and all sorts of calamity, not least of which maybe was cannibalism. Tell us that story and tell us about the attempted eradication of the Eurasian tree Sparrow in China.
Bethany Brookshire 44:04
Yeah, and like to be clear during the research for this chapter was intense. And not just because of the aftermath that was the great famine. It was intense also, because this is not stuff that is taught in China. It is not discussed. You do not talk to journalists about this. I ended up finding someone and talking to him through two interpreters. And like a couple of proxies and some encrypted messaging systems. That is not his real name, like but yeah, so in the late 1960s, 1950s and 1960s, there were several large kind of public sweeping campaigns that were kind of designed to move China into kind of this bright communist future and that some of them were very successful for so for example, there were mass vaccination campaigns, they worked super well. There were mass sanitation campaigns, those worked pretty well. There were also mass roadworks, those didn't work so well. And then there were mass pest eradication campaigns. And so the first four pests were rats and mice, which were like one pest, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows. And what I found really fascinating was I actually ended up getting translations, I have several wonderful translators who did this work, which, again, is dangerous. Even translating this work can be dangerous. They translated a bunch of scientific papers that kind of did historic historical papers, but also scientific papers that covered kind of the proceedings of the Communist Party, talking about the sparrows and basically saying, like, the ornithologists, were basically pressured into doing a bunch of experiments in declaring that sparrows were really bad. They didn't really seem to do it willingly. Like they, they kind of did. As in they said, Oh, yes, yes, sparrows definitely eat grain, we will open their stomachs. And we'll see that sparrows are full of grain, and they can eat this much grain, in this much time. And therefore, you know, if you extrapolate that out, you can absolutely, you know. But most of the scientists, when they were consulted for their real opinions were like, yeah, that it's not really going to make much of a difference. And they also eat bugs. So they might be useful. But the Communist Party did not care. And there were these huge mass eradication campaigns, some of which are detailed in this amazing book, called a Soviet scientist in Red China. And it was this guy who was a Soviet scientist, he was chemists. And he was assigned to go to China. And then he escaped, he escaped Soviet Russia, he went to Canada for a scientific conference, and never came back. And he wrote his memoirs. And in them, he talks about, you know, you'd wake up in the morning, and women would be running around waving bedsheets on poles, and screaming at the top of their lungs and banging pots, and everybody in the city would be doing this. And the whole goal was to get the sparrows to fly around until they died of exhaustion.
Marty Martin 47:16
Right, because there was some study that estimated how long they had to fly before they just fall out of the sky dead. Right?
Bethany Brookshire 47:23
Four hours.
Marty Martin 47:24
Four hours, which seems excessive.
Bethany Brookshire 47:27
And, and they also would send out like, the middle schools would send out their rifle teams to shoot these sparrows. And I think part of it was because this is something that, as with many of the more successful mass campaigns, it was something that you could see, right, you could pile up the bodies, it looked really impressive. Unfortunately, yeah, sparrows eat bugs, and later there were documented more insect problems. The sparrows themselves are probably not responsible on their own for the crop failures that followed. But they didn't help. And they think that the great famine later killed between 15 and 55 million people.
Cameron Ghalambor 48:08
So if we like, zoom out now, you know at the beginning, you talked about how, how, basically humans either by changing and creating habitat, or destroying habitat, kind of create the conditions for some of these species that become very common, and we sort of end up having conflicts with and referring to as pests come about. But I'm curious, like in the process of writing the book, did you did you kind of come away with any take home messages or commonalities about why certain species become like, human commensals? Or, or not? And why some are more successful ecologically relative to others? Were there any common themes that came through? Or is it more sort of idiosyncratic like, house sparrows versus other other types of birds?
Bethany Brookshire 49:08
Certainly, in terms of ecology, I can say it never hurts to be a generalist. Animals that are not picky eaters, do real good. That's just in general, and that's across taxa. So you know, birds that can eat grain but can eat bugs but can eat, you know, Twinkies, will tend to do a bit better than birds that are like, Oh, I only eat, you know, aged sunflower seeds that have been aged for primarily six to eight months. Like yeah, they don't do so good. The same is true of mammals. So you see a lot of mammals like black bears doing very well in North America, raccoons, coyotes. All of these we think of coyotes as predators, but let me tell you a coyote and a fruit tree? Close. They are close. So I would say, you know, generalists, and also animals that can tolerate being near humans, right? You need to tolerate us. You need to tolerate our noise, you need to tolerate our pollution, you need to tolerate the fact that we put concrete everywhere. Our habitats are not welcoming. So I, I really came away with this honestly, great admiration for the animals that make it near us, we do not make it easy. And when you see, I'm just like, we have no choice but to stan. You know, like, that bear has gone and made a den under your porch. And I love it. I'm here for it.
Marty Martin 50:43
Maybe maybe not feeding him Twinkies every afternoon, that might be pushing the envelope a bit too far. But yeah.
Bethany Brookshire 50:48
Don't do that. The number, the other thing that I really came away from, from this reporting with was stop feeding the animals, stop. Take down your bird feeder, stop feeding the raccoons. If you want your Disney Princess moments, go buy a bird.
Marty Martin 51:04
Or go to Disney, yeah.
Bethany Brookshire 51:06
Or go to Disney. But we force ourselves on into these interactions because of what we expect about these animals. And we expect them to respond to the way we behave, to read our behavior to see us as you know, this nice, friendly person. And then we are shocked when that coyote that somebody has been feeding for years comes up and bites a child on the hand. Because that's where the food comes from.
Marty Martin 51:35
Yeah. Yeah. Shouldn't shouldn't really be a surprise.
Bethany Brookshire 51:39
No, it really shouldn't.
Marty Martin 51:42
So we've got a couple more questions. And I think the the one that I most want to ask in our limited time, is, let's say when you write the new version of this book, 20 years into the future, will there be new species that you will need to write about? Because we've so urbanized so much of the world? I mean, assuming that that continues to happen, which I think in some ways that that's reasonable, that the climate is very different. Are there incipient pests that you expect to be writing about?
Bethany Brookshire 52:13
100% yes. Some of the animals that I covered near the end of the book are ones that I kind of think of as incipient pests. They're animals that aren't really pests, yet, they're still distant enough to be considered wildlife. But black bears are one of them. They're still distant enough to most people to be like, Oh, my God, I saw a bear. Yeah, people of Asheville, North Carolina would like a word about all the bears you've been seeing. So yeah, I think certainly there are species, the sulfur crested cockatoo in Australia. Love those guys.
Marty Martin 52:52
They are everywhere. Oh, my goodness.
Bethany Brookshire 52:54
They are. There are the Rosie parakeets. I think that's the species, they're little green dudes. They're really big in California. So I mean, no matter what, as long as we continue traveling around the world, changing our environments, changing the climate, we are going to make it easier for some species to make it. We're going to make it harder for some species to make it where they are. One of the good examples of this is the Burmese python in the Everglades, right, which is tromping its way through the Everglades right now. And we hate them, there is a python hunt. And you can go every year, and you can hunt as many as you can get. But the Burmese python is actually endangered in Southeast Asia because of habitat loss. And because we hunt it to make pretty bags out of its skin. And it's really fascinating to me how we can almost kill off an animal in one place. And it can thrive in another. And we're hating it, even though it's kind of making it like it's threatened. And yet we hate it. This is fascinating to me. But yes, I think there will always be always be new species.
Cameron Ghalambor 54:07
So if you, if you were, let's say put in charge of an education campaign to come up with like, maybe I don't know, a TV show, or a radio show or something that, you know, would be distributed widely. How would you how would you structure such a program to kind of put these types of human wildlife conflicts on people's radar because it strikes me that there's also there is, as I think you've mentioned, as humans, or especially living in cities have become more disconnected from nature. They've kind of lost some of the intuition I think about you know, the, the tourists every year that walk up to bison in Yellowstone and don't see them as large dangerous mammals and you know, end up getting hurt. How would you communicate these kinds of ideas? I mean, obviously, you've written the book. But if you have to, like, package it in a, in a way that maybe for a children's program, do you have ideas on how you how that could have that could be done?
Bethany Brookshire 55:18
I think one of the things that I really would want to emphasize is, as I mentioned, I was able to learn from a lot of indigenous people around the world, and in particular, indigenous people from North America. So lots of First Nations in Canada, Native Americans in the US. And one of the things I appreciated was how they perceive the world. So we view ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, right? We are not part of the ecosystem. Wilderness is something we go to to visit. And I really appreciated speaking to a lot of these indigenous people, because they were like, well, no, no, nature's right here. It's right here. It's in your house. And my one of my favorite quotes about this was from Joseph Marshall the third, who is a member of the Rosebud Sioux, and who wrote a book on this called on behalf of the wolf in the first peoples. And basically, he was talking about wolves. And he said, That's not to say we were always pleased with one another. But we always respected the other's right to be, right. You don't go around trapping and killing every coyote that you see. Right, the coyote has a place, it has a thing that it's supposed to do. That's not necessarily that you want it right next to you. But that you need to respect your place and their place, and neither one of you is in charge. And I think that's such an important framing. And I think it could really help us have less human wildlife conflict, if we stopped seeing these animals as interlopers into our space. Right. Kevin, effing Kevin, my squirrel, cannot read the deed to my property. He does not care that those tomatoes are mine, and I paid for them. He doesn't care. And so I need to make accommodations as to how I live with him. And so I think that that's kind of the underlying approach that I would want to take is this idea that so often when we see pests, we want to start a fight. We want to start a war, we want a rat czar, just going to poison all the rats out of New York City. And not only will that never work, it also isn't a useful way to actually live in these environments successfully.
Marty Martin 57:55
Well, Bethany, we really enjoyed the book, we really enjoyed the conversation. We know that you've got a hard out in just a couple of minutes. So we'd like to give you the chance to say anything that we haven't prompted you to say, is there any part of the book that you wanted to make sure to talk about? You want to tell us about your next book? Do you want to tell us about anything else with effing Kevin? What else? What did we leave out?
Bethany Brookshire 58:15
Um, no, I would say you've covered a lot of it. I think we come by our idea that we dominate over environments very much through our kind of Judeo Christian worldview. So I do talk about that a lot in the book. If I had to plug anything, go on YouTube and watch the free 1988 documentary cane toad an unnatural history. That thing is genius. Genius. It's only 45 minutes long.
Marty Martin 58:45
I'm sorry, we didn't have time. I'm sorry. We didn't have time to talk cane toads, that's one of my favorites, too. I saw that a while ago that highly recommended. The potatoes popping on the road is especially charming.
Bethany Brookshire 59:00
So good! My favorite.
Marty Martin 59:03
Cool. Well, thank you so much. It's great to talk to you and good luck with the book.
Cameron Ghalambor 59:05
Yeah. Thanks.
Bethany Brookshire 59:06
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Marty Martin 59:20
Thanks for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear, let us know via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you don't, we'd love to know that too. All feedback is good feedback.
Cameron Ghalambor 59:30
Thanks to Steve Lane, who manages the website and Ruth Demree for producing this episode.
Marty Martin 59:35
Thanks also to interns Dana De La Cruz and Kyle Smith for helping produce the episode. Keating Shahmehri produces the fantastic cover art.
Cameron Ghalambor 59:42
Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, the College of Humanities and Sciences at the University of Montana, and the National Science Foundation for support.
Marty Martin 59:53
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello.