Animal Vegetable Criminal, page 1
PRAISE FOR MARY ROACH
‘I sometimes wonder what animals have done wrong to deserve humans and what we do to them. But I know that humanity has done something right to deserve Mary Roach, the best guide possible to the fascinating but sometimes fraught interactions between human, animal and nature. She prowls through this intersection of worlds with the sleek grace of a leopard, diving into garbage cans, Indian elephant politics and mass murders of murders of crows, with her usual wit and wisdom.There’s only one downside to this delightful and brilliant book, and that’s that the animals can’t read it too.’
Rose George, journalist and author of Nine Pints
‘As hilarious as it is thoughtprovoking, Animal Vegetable Criminal is a brilliant read. Only Mary Roach can make such an obscure subject so intriguing. From battles with birds to marauding macaques, Roach reveals what happens when nature breaks human laws, with fascinating results.’
Monty Lyman, author of The Remarkable Life of the Skin
‘Mary Roach has been writing brilliant, funny and illuminating popular science books for years. Unfortunately – at least for those of us with ambitions to step into her shoes – she has gone and done it again! Animal Vegetable Criminal is as good as anything this wonderful author has ever written, and that is saying something.’
Graham Lawton, author of Mustn’t Grumble
‘Roach [is] a gentle, highly original and exceptionally funny science writer… Grunt is an extraordinary piece of reporting… alive with stories and gobbets of trivia, many of them told for the first time.’
The Times on Grunt
‘[A] quickfire exploration of the extraordinary world of military science.’
Sunday Express on Grunt
‘Sometimes you simply have to marvel at her ability to get behind the press release and into the laboratory… Completely fascinating.’
Daily Mail on Grunt
‘[A] splendid study of all things alimentary…’
Bill Bryson on Gulp
‘The funniest book [of the year] by far… almost every page made me laugh out loud.’
Sunday Times on Gulp
‘Insightful, sharp science writing that will have you snorting with laughter is Mary Roach’s speciality.’
New Scientist on Gulp
‘Don’t miss this…outing into space where no one can hear you scream with laughter… As a science writer Roach is seriously funny. She asks the right questions and provides answers like the best deadpan stand-up comic.’
The Times on Packing for Mars
‘Even readers with a long-term interest in manned exploration should find some new information within…if you like your space science served with emotion, anecdotes, and excreta, this is for you.’
BBC Sky at Night on Packing for Mars
‘This is definitely the kind of book that’ll have you reading out the juicy bits to friends and family…like a sassier – i.e. ruder – Bill Bryson… Fascinating.’
Daily Mail on Packing for Mars
ALSO BY MARY ROACH
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
For Gus, Bean, and Winnie. To the farthest star.
Contents
A Quick Word of Introduction
1MAUL COPS
Crime Scene Forensics When the Killer Isn’t Human
2BREAKING AND ENTERING AND EATING
How Do You Handle a Hungry Bear?
3THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Manslaughter by the Pound
4A SPOT OF TROUBLE
What Makes a Leopard a Man-Eater?
5THE MONKEY FIX
Birth Control for Marauding Macaques
6MERCURIAL COUGARS
How Do You Count What You Can’t See?
7WHEN THE WOOD COMES DOWN
Beware the “Danger Tree”
8THE TERROR BEANS
The Legume as Accomplice to Murder
9OKAY, BOOMER
Futile Military Actions Against Birds
10ON THE ROAD AGAIN
Jaywalking with the Animals
11TO SCARE A THIEF
The Esoteric Art of the Frightening Device
12THE GULLS OF ST. PETER’S
The Vatican Tries a Laser
13THE JESUIT AND THE RAT
Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life
14KILLING WITH KINDNESS
Who Cares About a Pest?
15THE DISAPPEARING MOUSE
The Scary Magic of Gene Drives
Acknowledgments
The Fuzzy Trespasser: Resources for Homeowners
Bibliography
A Quick Word of Introduction
On June 26, 1659, a representative from five towns in a province of northern Italy initiated legal proceedings against caterpillars. The local specimens, went the complaint, were trespassing and pilfering from people’s gardens and orchards. A summons was issued and five copies made and nailed to trees in forests adjacent to each town. The caterpillars were ordered to appear in court on the twenty-eighth of June, at a specified hour, where they would be assigned legal representation.
Of course no caterpillars appeared at the appointed time, but the case went forward anyway. In a surviving document, the court recognizes the rights of caterpillars to live freely and happily, pro- vided this does not “impair the happiness of man . . .” The judge decreed that the caterpillars be assigned a plot of alternate land for their sustenance and enjoyment. By the time the details were worked out, the defendants, having pupated, were surely through with their devastations, and all parties no doubt left the proceed- ings satisfied.
The case is detailed in an unusual 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. When I first paged through it, I wondered if it might be an ambitious hoax. Here were bears formally excommunicated from the Church. Slugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of “smiting.” But the author, a respected historian and linguist, quickly wore me down with a depth of detail gleaned from origi- nal documents, nineteen of which are reproduced in their original languages in a series of appendices. We have the itemized expense report of a French bailiff, submitted in 1403 following the murder trial of a pig (“cost of keeping her in jail, six sols parisis”). We have writs of ejectment issued to rats and thrust into their burrows. From a 1545 complaint brought by vintners against a species of greenish weevil, we have not only the names of the lawyers but early examples of that time-honored legal tactic, the stall. As far as I could tell, the proceedings dragged on eight or nine months—in any case, longer than the life span of a weevil.
I present all this not as evidence of the silliness of bygone legal systems but as evidence of the intractable nature of human- wildlife conflict—as it is known today by those who grapple with it professionally. The question has defied satisfactory resolution for centuries: What is the proper course when nature breaks laws intended for people?
The actions of the magistrates and prelates made no rational sense, of course, for rats and weevils cannot understand property law or be expected to conform to the moral principles of human civilizations. The aim was to cow and impress the populace: look here, even nature must bend to our rule! And it was, in its way, impres- sive. The sixteenth-century judge who granted leniency to moles with young offspring made a show not only of his authority but of his temperance and compassion.
Wandering through the Middle Ages and the centuries just beyond, I began to wonder what the modern epoch had brought to bear on these matters. Having sampled the esoteric solutions of law and religion, I set out to see what science has been bring- ing to the table, and what answers it might offer for the future. So began more wandering. My guides were people with titles unfa- miliar to me: Human-Elephant Conflict Specialist, Bear Manager, Danger-Tree Faller-Blaster. I spent time with predator attack spe- cialists and attack forensics investigators, builders of laser scare- crows and testers of kinder poisons. I traveled to some of the “hot spots”—back alleys in Aspen, Colorado; leopard-terrorized ham- lets in the Indian Himalaya; St. Peter’s Square the night before the pope’s Easter Mass. I considered the contributions of bygone professionals—the economic ornithologists and the rat searchers— as well as the stewards of the future, the conservation geneticists. I taste-tested rat bait. I was mugged by a macaque.
The book is far from comprehensive. Two thousand species in two hundred countries regularly commit acts that put them at odds with humans. Each conflict needs a resolution unique to the setting, the species, the stakes, the stakeholders. What you have here is the highlights of a two-year exploration, a journey through a world I had not known existed.
The first half of the book considers the felony crimes. Murder and manslaughter, serial killing, aggravated assault. Robbery and home invasion. Body snatching. Grand theft, sunflower seed. The perpetrators include the usual suspects, the bears and the big cats, and some less usual—monkeys, blackbirds, Douglas firs. The later pages explore acts less grievous but more widespread. We consider the jaywalking ungulates. The vultures and gulls that vandalize property for no discernible reason. The littering geese and the trespassing rodents.
Of course, these are not literal criminal acts. Animals don ’t follow laws, they follow instincts. Almost without exception, the wildlife in these pages are simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, shitting, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops. Nonetheless the conflicts exist, creating dilemmas for people and municipalities, hardships for wildlife, and material for someone else’s unusual book.
1
MAUL COPS
Crime Scene Forensics When the Killer Isn’t Human
For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do. In the extremely uncommon instance when a North American human is killed by a wild North American mammal, the investigation falls to officers and wardens with state or provincial departments of fish and game (or fish and wildlife, as less hunty states like mine have rebranded themselves). Because the incidents are so rare, few of these men and women have much experience with them. They’re more accustomed to poaching cases. When the tables turn and the animal is the suspect, a different kind of forensics and crime-scene know-how is called for.
Without it, mistakes are made. In 1995, a cougar was presumed to have killed a young man found dead on a trail with puncture wounds to the neck, while the true murderer, a human being, walked free. In 2015, a wolf was wrongfully accused of pulling a man from his sleeping bag and killing him. Cases like these are one reason there is WHART: Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training (and by its founders’ admission, “a horrible acronym”). WHART is a five-day course—part lecture and part field training—taught by members of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service.*
Because they have the experience. British Columbia has more cougar attacks than any other North American state or province. It has 150,000 black bears—to Alaska’s 100,000—17,000 grizzlies, and 60 predator attack specialists, 14 of whom (the specialists but not the bears) have driven down from Canada to serve as WHART instructors this week. WHART 2018 is being hosted by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which has offices in Reno. This fact helps explain why a training course for wilderness professionals would be held in a casino complex, where the resident wildlife amounts to the furry hominid on the Betti the Yetti slot machine and an unspecified “biohazard” that closed down the pool for a day. WHART seems to be the only booking at the Boomtown Casino event and conference center this week. Management has a bingo game going on in the next room.
The WHART student body, some eighty of us in all, has been split into small groups, each led by one of the predator attack specialists. Like many Canadians, they are distinguishable from white Americans mainly by sound. I’m referring to that uniquely farnorthern habit of ending statements with folksy interrogatives. It’s an endearing custom thrown somewhat off-kilter by the present subject matter. “Quite a bit of consumption and feedin’ and whatnot, eh?” “Holdin’ on by two, three tendons, right, ya know?”
Our conference room, the Ponderosa, is a standard offering with a podium and a screen for slides and videos. Less standard are the five large animal skulls sitting in a row on a long table at the front of the room, like participants in a panel discussion. On the screen, a grizzly bear is attacking Wilf Lloyd of Cranbrook, British Columbia. The footage is part of a presentation entitled “Tactical Killing of a Predator on a Person.” The instructor sums up the challenge that Wilf’s son-in-law faced in trying to shoot the bear but not the man: “All you could see was the body of the bear and a limb of Wilf once in a while.” The son-in-law saved Wilf’s life but also shot him in the leg.
Another challenge: Marksmanship deteriorates under the influence of adrenaline. Fine motor skills are out the window. The thing to do, we are told, is to “run directly up to that animal, plant the barrel and shoot upward” to avoid hitting the victim. Though you then run the risk of “attack redirection.” That’s a calm, technical way to say that the animal has dropped its victim and now it’s coming after you.
A second video illustrates the importance of order and discipline in the face of animal-attack mayhem. In it, a male lion charges a safari hunter. The other members of the hunting party wheel and scatter. The video is paused at various moments when a rifle is pointing both at the lion and at a hunter directly behind it. “Stay tight and communicate,” is the advice here. We will be practicing this kind of thing later, in an immersive field scenario out in the scrub near the Truckee River, below the casino.
The cursor glides to the Play arrow again, and the lion resumes its charge. I used to work at a zoo, and the roaring in the Lion House at feeding time was God-like. It twisted my viscera. And that was just their mealtime conversation. The lion in this video means to intimidate and destroy. The bingo party has to be wondering what the hell is going on in the Ponderosa Room.
After one more presentation, we break for lunch. Preordered sandwiches are waiting for us to pick up at a small deli over in the casino. We stand in line, attracting curious glances. It’s unusual, I suppose, to see so many uniformed law enforcement professionals inside a gambling establishment. I collect my lunch sack and follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”
While we were off on lunch break, the instructors stacked the chairs against the walls and laid out soft-touch male and female training manikins on the tables, one per group. Working from photographs, some of the more artistically inclined instructors have used paint and, apparently, hacksaws to create convincing facsimiles of actual wounds from attacks. Wounds is a tepid word for what teeth and claws can do.
My group’s manikin is a female, though it would be difficult to know this from what remains of her face, or from the sign attached to the table, which reads BUD. Later, walking to the bathroom, I pass a badly mauled LABATT and a decapitated MOLSON. Instead of being numbered, the manikin workstations have been beered. I take this to be an effort, a very Canadian-dude effort, to lighten the mood.
Our first task is to apply our newly acquired forensics savvy and determine what species it was that did the mauling. We’re looking at what’s known in attack forensics as “victim evidence”: injuries and clothing. The worst of the visible damage is above our manikin’s shoulder. (Only one remains.) Part of her neck is flayed, and a flap of scalp hangs loosened, like peeling stucco. Missing eyelid, nose, lips. We all agree it doesn’t seem like the work of Homo sapiens. Humans rarely eat their victims. If a murderer removes body parts, it’s likely to be hands or head—to stymie matches with fingerprints or dental records. Murderers occasionally take a trophy, but a shoulder or lip would be an unusual choice.
The consensus is that she was killed by a bear. Bears’ teeth are their main weapon, and their lightly furred face is their weak spot. When bears attack humans, they apply the tactics they use in fights with other bears. “They go teeth to teeth, right? So their instinct is to go right for your face.” Joel Kline, our youthful, forthright instructor, has been an investigator on ten cases of bear attack. “They come right at you and you have all these massive injuries right to the face.” Joel’s own face—our focus as we take in his words—is blue-eyed, unblemished, peachy clear. I work hard not to picture it in that state.
Bears are inelegant killers partly because they’re omnivores. They don’t regularly kill to eat, and evolution has equipped them accordingly. They feed on nuts, berries, fruit, grasses. They scavenge trash and carrion. A cougar, by contrast, is a true carnivore. It lives by the flesh of animals it kills, and thus it kills efficiently. Cougars stalk, well hidden, and then pounce from behind and deliver a “killing bite” to the back of the neck. Their molars close like scissors blades, cutting flesh cleanly. A bear’s mouth evolved for crushing and grinding, with flat molar surfaces and jaws that move side to side as well as up and down. Wounds made by bears’ teeth are cruder.
