Dylan Thuras: I’m going to use a slightly more polite term, but maybe you could tell me about Fricking Kevin as you called him.
Bethany Brookshire: Yes. Effing Kevin is what I also sometimes call him. So, Effing Kevin lives in my backyard. To be fair, there is not a single Kevin. Kevin is a stand-in for like one of any 20—
Dylan: Kevin is a collective.
Bethany: Yeah, Kevin is a collective term, a gender neutral collective term for the Eastern gray squirrels that live in my backyard. And I am endlessly frustrated by Kevin because I am a gardener and I like to grow tomatoes. And Kevin also likes tomatoes, which is a real issue. And so, Kevin will take the tomato and he will take one bite. And then he will go—
Dylan: Yes. The one bite out of the tomato is like a deep cruelty to the gardener.
Bethany: Yes. It’s one bite, and then Kevin recalls that he does not actually like tomatoes. And he just leaves it right there. And several years running now, the Kevins in my yard have eaten every single tomato in my garden.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: Dozens and dozens of tomatoes. And it has been an endless source of frustration to me.
Dylan: It seems like perhaps these interactions with your Kevins kind of opened up something for you, a kind of area of inquiry as a journalist that maybe took you much, much farther than just figuring out how to stop your backyard squirrels from nibbling on your tomatoes. What did this open up for you?
Bethany: Yeah, so I became really fixated on why our emotional reactions to some animals are so very strong in one direction or another. Right? There are some animals that we just hate all the time. And I mean, we really, really hate these animals. And then there are some that we love all the time, no matter what they do. Even when, in some cases, the two sets of animals, one that we really hate and one that we really love, are in fact causing the same amount or kind of harm. We have such different reactions to two different types of animals. And I became really fascinated by what it is that makes us hate some animals so very, very much.
Dylan: Why do some animals have such good branding and others such bad PR?
Bethan: Yes.
Dylan: Yeah. Well, I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible and wondrous places. And today I’m talking with Bethany Brookshire about pests. Why are some animals pests and some animals beloved, cherished pets or examples of beautiful wildlife? Where is the line? How is it created? Why are some animals Kevins and others something else, something lovely? Bethany is an animal-human conflict expert. Is that a good description?
Bethany: I would call it human-animal interactions.
Dylan: Okay.
Bethany: Just because conflict is real aggressive.
Dylan: Yeah, okay. Human-animal interaction expert. And the author of a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. And in the book, you contemplate where animals belong, where they don’t, why we decide this, how it happens and how it changes over time. So we are going to get into this subject today. What makes a pest, and why the answer is a lot more philosophical and surprising than you might first think.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: I’m so excited to talk to you about this. Can I ask, where you based?
Bethany: I’m outside of Washington, D.C.
Dylan: Okay. A number of years ago, I moved out of New York City and I moved to a little bit more upstate to the Hudson Valley. So we have now a yard, we also try to garden. And this changed my thoughts of what certain pests were and were not. I mean, it’s very funny. Sometimes we have friends up from the city and we see deer around and they’re like, oh my God! And I’m like, no, no, no. They’re just an irritating, hurting presence just around eating the grass, pooping, trying to eat you. It’s like, they’re not special. I imagine that you being where you are sort of has shaped your own worldview slightly, of kind of what you define as a pest and do not define as a pest.
Bethany: Yeah. So I am actually from western Virginia. I’m from Appalachia. And so I am very familiar with the depredations of deer. I am very familiar with bears, you know, lots of those. Then, I’ve also lived in urban environments. So actually, when I started researching this book, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And there, I became intimately familiar with rats, but also with wild turkeys, because Cambridge, Massachusetts has an amazingly large wild turkey population.
Dylan: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think you’re sort of a lot of this definition. You know, if you’re a New Yorker, rats, cockroaches, pigeons, these are the pests, right? And I don’t give two thoughts to pigeons or cockroaches, frankly. But you know, ants have become like a much bigger part of my life. And, you know, just sort of the environment dictates so much sort of what your relationship with those animals are. One thing in your book that surprised me is there are some creatures that really change from, you know, being beloved to being a kind of reviled pest.
Bethany: Yes. So, my favorite story about this is the story of the pigeon. And don’t tell the others, but the pigeon is my favorite pest.
Dylan: Nice. Nice.
Bethany: They’re beautiful. Like, if you stop to really look closely at a pigeon, you become astonished by what beautiful birds they are. Right? They’ve got these stunning little iridescent, like, throats. And you’re sitting here going, you pay good money to get iridescent colors like that at the nail salon.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: But we’re like, kicking pigeons? Yeah. Excuse me? Anyway, I think of the pigeon in particular as kind of the outdated iPhone of the animal world. Because, part of the reason pigeons exist around us today is because every urban pigeon that you see now in North America, in Europe, everywhere, is the feral descendant of a domesticated bird. We domesticated the pigeon. They are one of our oldest domesticated birds, I believe about 8,000 years ago-ish. And for a long time, the pigeon was an incredibly useful species to us. We use them for food. If you’ve ever had squab in a fancy restaurant, you have eaten pigeon. You have not just eaten pigeon, you’ve eaten baby pigeon. So, slightly awkward.
Dylan: Think about that.
Bethany: Pigeon poop is wonderful fertilizer. It was used to tan leather. And of course, pigeons were very, very important as messengers. There are pigeons that have won military honors for their courage under fire. Because the thing—
Dylan: Yeah, Cher Ami?
Bethany: Cher Ami, yes. World War I. Yeah. Cher Ami, I mean, to be clear, this bird was shot down, rose again, and flew home. And flew home missing a leg—thankfully not the leg carrying the message—and an eye. He received a military send-off when he went back home to the U.S. This bird was incredible. And all of this is based—the domestication of the pigeon and our use of the pigeon is based on something very fundamental to the pigeon’s lifestyle. Which is that pigeons are cliff-dwelling birds, right? They live on cliffs, they go out during the day, they feed themselves, they find their own food, and they go home. And luckily for us, buildings look a lot like cliffs. And so, you just take your pigeon and you put it in the building. And the pigeon is like, ah, this is my cliff and I will go out and I will feed myself and I will come back.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: But then, as our use of the pigeon declined, right, we developed chemical fertilizer. We developed the telegraph. We developed the phone. We developed the domesticated chicken in large-scale production for meat, right? As we did all of this, we lost our use for the pigeon, but the pigeon is still here. And you can say, we have no use for you and we can kick it out and the pigeon’s just going to keep going out and it’s going to keep coming home. And that is why we have these urban populations of pigeons. And it’s so sad to see that the trait that we loved, that this animal goes out, feeds itself, comes home without fail, are now a source of our annoyance because we have decided that these pigeons no longer belong where we put them. Mary Douglas was a famous anthropologist and she talked about dirt as matter out of place. One could similarly argue that pests are animals that are out of place. But who determines place? And the trick in both of those cases is that we do.
Dylan: Yeah. I mean, and the other kind of irony is, of course, that we are often the ones bringing these animals to these new environments. You know, we are the ones bringing rats on ships or taking cats with us as pets or whatever and bringing all of these animals to environments, which then they learn to adapt in and thrive in and then we’re like, you know, quite put out by them. What we consider a pest and what we don’t, it has a ton to do with place, with where you are encountering these animals. For example, a mouse in a lab, it’s very different from a mouse in your house. And for years, Bethany worked in a lab. She researched the effects of drugs on the brain. And she says that when she would tell someone what she did for a living, the person would always ask with some concern if she did that work on monkeys, which is really understandable. And then they would be quite relieved when she said that they used mice instead. And it made her kind of wonder why.
Bethany: And so it was really interesting to me how some animals are more acceptable as subjects of our violence than others. So I ended up actually kind of going down a rabbit hole, I guess you could call it a mouse hole, about the development of the mouse as a laboratory animal. The first mouse strain, the one that’s most popular now is the C57 Black 6J, where J stands for Jackson. And Jackson is a reference to the Jackson Laboratory, which is in Maine, and which many scientists jokingly call the house of mouse. And it was really fascinating to me because C.C. Little, the founder of the Jackson Laboratory, was kind of the founder of the concept of the lab mouse as a very useful thing for scientific research. The lab mouse is derived not from pest mice. The lab mouse is derived from fancy mice. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s something called the mouse fancy. I did not know this. There’s a magazine you can buy called the mouse fancy. And basically you breed mice for particular pretty traits. And there’s also mouse agility tests that you can compete your mice in. Since finding out about this, I have kept some eyeballs on the fancy mouse industry. And I think one day I would like to breed and compete fancy mice. Like that’s now a goal of mine.
Dylan: That sounds awesome. This is amazing. I’m picturing a dog show, but on a much smaller scale.
Bethany: Very similar, actually, yes. It’s a little bit more, actually, like a fancy cat show in that you don’t trot out the mice. Like the mice aren’t on little leashes. It’s more you pick it up and you’d be like, here, look at this mouse. But yeah, so there were people breeding these mice. So basically, C.C. Little took a bunch of these mice that were being bred as fancy mice and he started inbreeding them with each other until the inbred mouse strains—and there are many of them now—all have basically identical genomes. And so he started trying to, actually during the Great Depression, he started selling these mice to laboratories. And what was really interesting was he easily persuaded scientists like, hey, you want to use these inbred mice. They’re way cheaper. They take up less space. They eat less food. And so that was a pretty easy thing. But then C.C. Little had to sell the mouse to the American public as a lab animal. And he wrote this wonderful article for Scientific American, and it opens with the line, “Do you like mice? Of course you don’t.”
Dylan: Interesting.
Bethany: And it basically says, these mice that you hate could be heroes of medicine. They could help us cure cancer. And he used the fact that we hate the mouse as a way to make it acceptable to use the mouse in a laboratory context. And that persists today, almost 100 years later. Now we see the mouse, and rats as well, as kind of the acceptable sacrifice for human progress, in part because of the way we hate them.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: Right?
Dylan: I’d never really thought about this before, but obviously the mouse and rat, like our relationship with them as pests is like 10,000 years old. It’s as old as basically any kind of agriculture. But suddenly we’ve sort of almost inverted this relationship and said, okay, now we are going to produce many, many, many mice for this very human endeavor. Most of us agree that there are certain pests we just don’t like. You know, cockroaches, flies buzzing around your kitchen, or even mice in our houses and squirrels in our gardens. But that’s kind of the easy stuff. Because, what about animals that are almost universally beloved and yet cause major problems? And because of all sorts of cultural and sentimental and even economic reasons, we don’t want to think about them like that. So, I mean, this is just, this whole area is fascinating. I think one of the other things I’d love to talk about is maybe the flip side of this, right? So we’re talking about some animals that we all think of as pests, and maybe talking about different ways in which they were once valuable to us, but no longer are, or how we’ve sort of, you know, taken a pest and kind of domesticated it for other use. But what are animals that most people have a really positive association with that, in fact, maybe are more troublesome or difficult to deal with, or we just aren’t thinking about the ways in which they are a pest to someone else?
Bethany: Yeah. So one of my favorite examples of this is the house cat. And I say this with love. I have two cats, and I love them both desperately. They are wonderful. But what I found really fascinating in my research is that when, for example, say you have an island, okay? And the island has a population of seabirds, and those seabirds are endangered. Sometimes you will have a rat population on that island, and the rats will eat the eggs of the seabirds, and they are endangering the seabirds. In those cases, we have no hesitation. We will drop millions of tons of poison on those islands. Millions of tons. We will spend billions of dollars to kill those rats, eradicate every single one. We will do whatever it takes, right? And yet, there are also islands with endangered populations of seabirds where there are feral cats and the feral cats are eating the seabirds. And then we will do anything to make sure that we are somehow managing the situation without killing the cats. We’re like, well, surely you can trap and adopt it, or trap and neuter it and return it, or anything. We are so desperate to find anything that we can do where we don’t kill it. And it’s fascinating to me because these are two different species doing the exact same thing. I was thinking about this in particular because a lot of my research was about Aotearoa, which is New Zealand. And of course, New Zealand had no native mammal predators until humans arrived, and it had no cats until white humans arrived. And now they have major problems with predators: rats, stoats, possums, and cats. And there is a movement called Predator Free 2050 where the goal is to rid New Zealand of predators, mammal predators, by 2050. And that is through poisoning. It is through traps. It is through shooting. It is through snares. Forty-one percent of New Zealanders have cats.
Dylan: That’s going to be troublesome since cats are kind of like tiny little apex predators out there.
Bethany: Yes, and what’s really interesting is that in studies of what people in Aotearoa think of their cats, they firmly believe that cats have a right to roam. Because they are predators, they should be allowed outside. They should be allowed to hunt even when the things they are hunting are incredibly endangered species. And it’s tragic, but fascinating. And I get it. I do. I have cats. I understand. And so it’s just really interesting to see how our cultural expectations and biases around the animals we love shape what we’re willing to accept.
Dylan: All right, let me try one animal on you that I’m going to argue, pure pest, no redeeming. The bed bug. I don’t know enough about its ecological niche. I know possums eat them and stuff, but I’m like, I don’t know. Maybe the bed bug, we can say that is a pest.
Bethany: Opossums actually eat ticks.
Dylan: Oh, they eat ticks.
Bethany: Yeah.
Dylan: What eats bed bugs?
Bethany: I was going to say, if an opossum is eating a bed bug, you have bigger problems because you have an opossum in your house.
Dylan: You’re right. Yes, that’s absolutely true. So what is even eating bed bugs?
Bethany: I mean, I can’t defend bed bugs. I won’t do it.
Dylan: Yes, we got one! Agreement.
Bethany: Because I would say that bed bugs and to some extent, lice, fleas, those are actually in the category that I would call ectoparasites. So they’re not harming our stuff, they’re harming us directly. It’s a different animal and a different relationship.
Dylan: Yes. This is not about sharing space. This is about—I mean, you got to get out of here. All right. No bed bugs. Good. All right. So how has this project, how has your own relationship to the idea of pests changed since you started working on this?
Bethany: I don’t know that I ever truly just had a knee jerk reaction to pests, but I will say I’m now actually excited to see rats in cities. I’m like, oh, look, oh, he’s so big. Look at him. He’s a healthy guy. Like I get really excited. But the main change is that when I deal with animal conflict in my own life, when I’m dealing with Kevin, I no longer ask myself how to keep this animal away. I do ask that. But I also ask, what does this animal want? Why is it here? What is this animal trying to take advantage of? Right? And then, if we knew that, if we approached these animals with curiosity, if we saw the spaces we lived in more as ecosystems, then we might find ways to change our own behavior to reduce these conflicts. People who change the way that they get rid of their trash to stop conflict with black bears.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: Right now, people in New York City are trying to change how they deal with their trash to help reduce rat populations.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bethany: Right? And that is approaching your environment with curiosity. That is saying, can I change something about the environment instead of just attacking the animal? Right? And I think that’s such an important angle to take. One that is more accepting of the fact that we are not separate from nature. We live with it. We live in it. Even when we live in houses, in suburbs, we are in a natural environment. And I think approaching our environments with a little more curiosity and a little less violence, knee-jerk violence, might go a long way.
Dylan: Well, Bethany, what a joy to talk to you. What a fascinating subject. I feel like we could get into so many different aspects of this, but this was great.
Bethany: Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a super fun conversation.
Dylan: Likewise. Bethany Brookshire is an animal-human interaction expert and author of a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. It is really good. Go check it out.
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