Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains is a book that I rate right in the middle, not because it was a mediocre book across the board, but because I am averaging out the very polarized reactions that I had to it. I found myself both entertained and infuriated by the way this book was written and how these topics were handled by Brookshire. I knew going in that any book about animals mislabeled as "pests" was going to have a lot of animal suffering and death in it. I also knew from the description that this book was going to focus heavily on human thoughts and feelings about these topics. I could have handled a balanced amount of either of those. The biggest issue is that this writer became an accidental subject in her own piece, not because she shared personal anecdotes, but because her own bias taints much of the book. There are some redeeming statements at the end that help, but the fact that they were not appropriately woven throughout the text means that the writer is hit far more with the authors' (and far too many of her friends and family members') biases against (and occasionally for) other animals.
Let's start with the good- the 5 star stuff. This book had a ton of potential for several reasons. It is written in an accessible journalistic style. It is both readable for a variety of educational backgrounds and entertaining as well. It is also very well researched from what I can tell. Since this is an uncorrected proof, I do have a list of sources at the end but not footnote numbers in the text to match them to. I did not take the time to go through and fact check all of the sources, but from what I can tell, they were used responsibly. Strangely enough, I hated parts of this book, but put more page flags on the pages than a lot of books I have liked. I learned a lot of information about various animals, how they arrived where they did, how they continued to proliferate, the awful things that were done to them, and occasionally the not awful options (which were woefully not covered enough.) I liked the graphic design of the print copy as well as how the book was organized into different chapters for different animals. The inclusion of indigenous peoples perspectives from a variety of tribes, backgrounds, and locations was commendable. There are flaws in how she suggests that they apply to the bigger picture (for instance, you would cause mass extinction and habitat destruction if everyone started hunting deer, animal flesh from any source is unsustainable as it is currently consumed by settlers and many other populations,) but they are critical in seeing this issue from a more holistic point of view. There should have been more inclusion of their wisdom, but at least they balanced out the parade of anthropocentrism in the rest of the book.
These are the reasons I kept coming back to this book rather than throwing it in the trash. Unfortunately, there were a lot of times that I wanted to throw it in the trash.
The most glaring issue with this book is that it may have been doomed from its inception. There is no effort to understand and explain the point of view and experiences of other "pest" animals and to consider them as important in their own right by the author. The very sparse, often one-sentence, bits from interviews with indigenous people/scholars and occasional creative conservationists and vets does not make up for this flaw in discussing other animals is distant simplistic beings whose descriptions are limited to the conflict they have with humans. There are horrific killing methods mentioned throughout the text and very rarely does she even touch on how agonizing they are for the animals or harmful for the ecosystem. For instance, snakes need less oxygen to stay alive than we do, meaning the casually mentioned decapitation is slow torture. The poisoning of rodents (an often birds who eat them) is a lengthy torture, this gets one sentence. "Harvesting," "culling," and many other euphemisms also often involve terrifying captures and painful deaths. Campaigns that encourage the public to contribute often have lasting effects on other species, celebrating cruelty all around. I will spare you the endless amount of cruelties that were not properly addressed as such in this book.
Brookshire's bias is clear throughout the book in other ways. The message of almost every chapter is humans have to kill all of these animals, sad but true. She predominantly interviews people who believe this. That is, until we get to cats. The author has pet cats. So, despite feral cats being worse for birds and ecosystems than many of the previous animals discussed, they get a more fair shake in the discussion. There is a nuanced discussion of various points of view, including ones that say maybe the cats shouldn't pay the price of humans' constant destruction. Maybe there are other ways. Endangered elephants also get more fair treatment because who doesn't love an endangered species? Elephants also do because in the areas where there is conflict, the residents respect the elephants more overall than westerners and many others do with conflicting species while also dealing with the wests misunderstanding of human-elephant conflicts. Even though she regularly acknowledges that humans are the reason every single time that a species becomes a pest, the chapters usually still have suggestive thread that there is something about the other animal that is the problem. She will discuss how we've attracted wild animals with "our" spaces far more than she discusse how we've taken everything from them and left them the scraps.
It is quite clear in the section about rodents that the author used to previously put them through terror and hell before killing them in labs- had I known this before starting this book, I likely would have spared myself. Snakes? Easy enough animals for the author to give a one sided story on. Though we do get to hear about how the people "love" snakes like she "loves" mice right after we learn that they have contests where the winner gets an award for killing the most. The celebration does not sound like mourning to me. If someone was having a kitten slaughter competition, I don't think the author would have written about them the same way.
Her treatment of people who harm(ed) animals for work- including herself- sometimes made me wonder if she worked PR for animal exploitation industries or if the cognitive dissonance was just so strong that she could not see past it. She has the audacity to say that mice- a species that has been tortured and slaughtered by the billions in labs with no animal welfare act protections- are "winning" by being bred, harmed in an unfathomable variety of ways, and killed there because they get to "pass on their genes" through no consent of their own after being purpose bred and sold. All of this is said after she admits that mice were chosen for such cruelty in part because of their pest status and the struggles vivisectors were having defending the use of dogs. She also talks about how ranchers losing animals to wolves and other predators grieve such an emotional loss of the animals they "care for," completely ignoring the fact that they are grieving the loss of being able to send these animals to a slaughterhouse that will make a wolf pack look like a sanctuary. These are but a few examples. It is one thing to say one used to harm animals, that ranchers kill and sell meat, that hunters grow up in a certain culture. It is another to claim victims of these industries are some how lucky, cared for, loved, or considered someone higher than property.
The author also interviews a lot of her friends and family who are generally as anthropocentric as she is. We learn of someone who used to think deer were "cute" ...until her dogs attacked them (multiple times!) and the deer had the audacity to defend themselves and their babies. We learn about how hunting is a beautiful experience of being one with nature. I can tell you as a birder, nothing is stopping you from getting up early and sitting silently in the woods and waiting for an animal to show up. You don't need to shoot or stab anyone to do it or you can "capture" and "shoot" pictures instead. We learn of her friend who uses a sword against a raccoon. The author even opens the book with a story about "fucking Kevin"- a name she's given all the squirrels in her neighborhood because they might have disturbed her pitiful tomato, who she considers shooting with a bb gun. It is done partly in jest, but also with clear disdain. It is not the best way to show someone you're going to give "pests" fair treatment. It's not that I completely oppose these stories- they show humans' self-centered, ignorant, and irrational ways of thinking about other animals. The issue is that, when she draws from her own circle so much, she doesn't draw from others' enough. I remember every time there was someone in a chapter who challenged the maligning and slaughtering of various animals- who reacted to them as if the whole world didn't exist for humans- because there were so few of those people in this book.
At the end of each chapter, there are usually a couple of sentences, often good ones, about the reality of the situation. But, up against an entire chapter of unchallenged and contrary information, they don't pack the same punch. The author's conclusion is the fairest and most enlightened part of the book (still needing work, but it's a drop of water in the desert.) I found myself asking, "Why didn't you say any of this in the other chapters? Why did you give ethicists and people who care about other animals' right to exist- including "pests"- so little space until now? Judging by the way it is written, the author learned a lot through the process of writing this book, but never went back to check if the other chapters identified that process. She eventually comes to many of the right answers. If anyone is a pest, it's us. We are creative people who can come up with creative conflict management solutions. We should share the planet rather than dominating it. A lot of issues are rooted in colonialism. Etc. Had she written more about these points than a few pages at the end, perhaps I would have enjoyed this book more and found it more balanced. I can't say I recommend this book, but if you do read it, take what you can from it and then read another 20 or so books about other animals to fill the gaps- preferably ones that aren't all about how humans turn them into monsters.
This was also posted to my goodreads.
