Bethany Brookshire: Rethinking “pests” and the ways they challenge power and order (Ep434)

Written By kamea chayne
“Not all cultures have a word for pest, because not all cultures have a concept of an animal that meets that definition — an animal that is out of place.”
— Bethany Brookshire

What does it mean that the labeling of “pests” often relates to how they challenge power and order? How do the ways that “pests” are often targeted and managed further exacerbate socio-environmental injustices? And how might we learn to relate with animals deemed “out of place” beyond the subjective framing of “pests” altogether?

In this episode, we are honored to discuss all things related to “pests” with Bethany Brookshire, an award-winning freelance science journalist and author of the 2022 book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains.

We invite you to…

 

About our guests:

Bethany Brookshire is an award-winning freelance science journalist and author of the 2022 book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. She has a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology. Brookshire writes on human-animal conflict, ecology, environmental science, and neuroscience. She is fascinated by the way humans perceive the environment and their place in it. Her work has appeared in Science News, Science News Explores, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, The Atlantic and other outlets. She is based in Washington, D.C.

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bethany Brookshire: We believe, the Oxford English Dictionary  rates the word pest back to the 14th century, where it is from the French pest, “p. e. s. t. e.”, which means plague or pestilence and usually referred to illness, and then began to refer to pests as individuals. It usually was referring to smaller animals, so mice, but also locusts, flies, things like that. Until about the 16th or 17th centuries, we were talking about larger animals that bothered people, which could include, stoats, weasels, things like that. We usually use the word vermin and not pest.

Pest kind of began gaining ground in the Industrial Revolution, in part because you could actually have pest exterminators and pest management. And so that's where they started gaining ground.

What I found really interesting when I was studying and researching for this book was to learn that obviously different languages have different words for pest, but not all languages do because not all cultures have a word for pest, because not all cultures have a concept of an animal that meets that definition — an animal that is out of place. 

Taking from Mary Douglas's definition of dirt, which is matter that is out of place. A pest is an animal out of place, an animal that is not where we want it to be, doing something that we don't want it to do. And so pest kind of came to mean that, but it came to mean that only in specific societies, because there are other cultures, some of which I got to learn from as I was reporting this book, that do not have the concept of an animal where it's not supposed to belong.

Kamea Chayne: We actually had another very recent episode with Jessica J. Lee of [the book] Dispersals that nuanced the category of weeds as typically being seen as plants out of place. So I'm curious, how does the label pests parallel or differ from weeds in the plant world? And I’m also wondering how subjective (as you already started touching on) the label pest is. As in, what are some of the motives or reasons behind why some people might consider a species as pests, whether that's just simple disgust or fear, danger, disease, destructiveness, or anything else?

Bethany Brookshire: I would say that Jessica Lee is absolutely correct with the designation of the weed as a plant out of place. A pest, similarly, can be described as an animal out of place. And both of them are fulfilling a certain role. They are somewhere we don't want them to be. They are doing something we don't want them to do. 

In the case of weeds, they are sometimes, for example, choking out the plants that we want in that area. For animals, often what I find most fascinating about pest animals is that they don't attack us necessarily. Most of them aren't attacking us. They are not carnivores that are here to eat us. They are not even necessarily things like fleas or lice. Those are usually described as parasites, ectoparasites living on our skin. These pests aren't eating us, they are eating our stuff. They're coming after the things we value. They're coming after our crops. They're coming into our houses. And I find that really interesting because…

There are a whole bunch of assumptions built into [what a pest is]. This means the word pest is completely subjective and based on what humans want and what humans believe about our environment. It requires that humans place a barrier between an area that is theirs and an area that is not. 

And this is where you get into different cultural ideas of what is ours and what isn't. Because in the process of reporting this book, I got to learn from a number of Indigenous cultures, and members of those cultures often told me they had no word for pest. And that was because, in part, they did not see their place in the environment as being separate from the environment itself. They are living in their environment and the animals are there too. So there was no real distinction between an area that is explicitly theirs and an area that isn't. 

For example, in the Anishinaabe languages, which are Indigenous languages that are around the Great Lakes region, they had no concept of wilderness until after colonization, because wilderness implies an area where people are not meant to be. That implies an area that is separate from humans. It implies a mindset that is separate from the environment around you. And I find that really fascinating just how much these words, and the animals that we use on them, or the word pest and the animals that we use it on, are the result of us. They are the result of what we want. They're the result of our beliefs about our environment.

Kamea Chayne: A lot of times our actions and understandings of how to quote unquote manage things around us kind of are contingent upon our worldviews. And that is so diverse across cultures and different places that really brings in questions of how people relate to place and belonging. 

And also with the word “wilderness” as well, I'm aware that in many Indigenous languages and other cultures, there's also no word for “nature” , because that's similarly defined as animals, plants, insects, and everything other than humans and what humans create. So essentially creating that binary and separation. 

And something that's really interesting to think about is how people who do kind of have this concept of pests (I guess people view different species differently) but some species are seen by certain cultures as pests to get rid of and others to the same people are cherished and loved. But ultimately in our entangled more-than-human world, everything is connected. So I wonder if you can share some examples of how people have tried to kill or maybe get rid of some pest issue, but in doing so, it might indirectly harm other species that some people have different attitudes towards and even might revere. What are some ways that this has played out as reminders of our deep connectedness and entanglement?

Bethany Brookshire: It's really fascinating to me because there are, I hate to say it because it's often very cruel, but some of the ways we've actually worked to try and get rid of pests in our lives are downright hilarious. They're honestly very funny. We hire falconers to try and get rid of birds on airport runways. We have literally released deadly diseases to try and control rabbits. There are so many things that we do that are often terrible, but they're also almost silly in terms of the hubris of it all.

But one of the examples that might be kind of most close to home for people is actually rat poison. So we frequently poison rats in urban and suburban and in fact in rural environments as well. Usually the most common rat poison used these days are the second generation anticoagulant rodenticides. So the first generation is drugs like warfarin, which you might be familiar with because it's used in humans. It is used in people as an anticoagulant. It has saved millions of lives. It was discovered as a rat poison. And the second generation is drugs like brodifacoum. And brodifacoum is a much more powerful version of these anticoagulant drugs. And the drugs work like an anticoagulant. They stop the blood from clotting. And so the rats bleed internally to death. It is not a great way to die. It is a terrible way to die. But it does work. And unfortunately, one of the knock-on effects of this has been that as raptors, And as hawks, owls, and peregrine falcons come back into our urban environments, they eat rats. And many of those rats have rat poison in their systems. And so I have been talking to a lot of experts on this topic. 

There's a woman, Maureen Murray at Tufts, the Veterinary Institute at Tufts, and she has been documenting levels of anticoagulant rodenticides, rat poisons, in raptors in Massachusetts. And her most recent finding is that 100 % of the animals that are brought to her have rat poison in their livers. 100%. It's about 70 % currently in New York City. I can tell you that. But this hit home pretty recently with the case of Flaco the owl. And Flaco was a Eurasian eagle owl who was living in, I Want to say the Bronx Zoo? He was living in one of the zoos in New York City. And Flaco escaped and began to live in Manhattan. And everyone immediately was team Flaco and people would go see him because he was just living his best life. And Flaco recently died. I think he died back in, I want to say March, possibly February. And when they did a necropsy, because of course they did, they found that he had rat poison in his liver. 

That's not necessarily what killed him. He also, for example, had a nasty case of pigeon herpes, potentially from eating pigeon. But he definitely had rat poison, and I think it really raised the issue of the fact that we do do this, and…

Some of our methods for managing these animals have these big knock-on effects on charismatic animals that we love, charismatic animals that we want to see.

Kamea Chayne: And even in this example, even if they didn't die from the rat poison, how might it have possibly negatively affected their quality of life and like sense of vitality and well-being? There are just so many things we don't know and have yet to understand in terms of the unintended consequences. 

And there are so many examples, like you said, of this. I feel like every bio -cultural region has many of their own stories of ‘this thing was implemented to address this thing’ and then it actually created a whole set of other issues that they're now trying to address as well. It just keeps going on. And I feel like bioaccumulation in terms of mercury and other things in the seafood food chain, a lot of people eat seafood and it has a very direct impact on people in many cases. So I feel like a lot of people are more aware of issues like that. 

But what are other ways that this has been happening across our entangled web of life, however directly or indirectly, and what is that ultimately happening to our collective body of the planet? There is still so much that we don’t know. 

Bethany Brookshire: One of the things that came through as I reported this book [Pests], was how often….

[When it comes to pest control] we are acting out of ignorance. We're acting often based on the best science at the time, and science is a process. 

One of my other favorite examples, and the example that I think is actually very funny, is the cane toad in Australia. Tthere was a problem in the 1920s. Australians were trying to (the colonizing Australians, not the indigenous Australians) were trying to grow sugar cane. And they were having problems with cane beetles. The cane beetles came in on the sugar cane and started eating it up and they were causing major crop losses. And they came across a paper where a woman had fed a bunch of bugs to a cane toad, which are native to Central America, and the cane toad had eaten cane beetles. And they were like, well, this seems promising. And so they imported a whole bunch of cane toads to Australia and released them. And they were like, this is going to be great. But it turns out that cane toads– it's not that they don't eat cane beetles, they do–it's just cane beetles when they are adults fly and cane toads do not. And cane beetles dig when they are babies and cane toads do not. And so the window for cane toads to actually acquire cane beetles is actually quite small. The cane toads, however, found plenty of other stuff to eat in Australia and are still spreading to this day across the continent.

Kamea Chayne: I'm aware that in Hawaii, people imported or brought in the mongoose to try to address the rat issue because rats were considered pests for a lot of people, but also they were very devastating for native bird populations. 

So they brought in this mongoose to try to have them be predators for the rats. But as it turns out, the mongoose are active during the daytime and rats are nocturnal and are active during the night time, so we actually just worsened the whole issue. 

Quote unquote “pests” during the daytime and mongoose don't have quote unquote natural predators here so now mongoose are getting out of hand and rats are still here and they're both harming native bird populations. 

Bethany Brookshire: Because mongoose love eggs just as much as rats do.

Kamea Chayne: We could write an entire book (and you did) and there's more still to be written on this subject in terms of all these examples in different places where this has happened. But I appreciate the ones that you brought in here. 

To pivot a little bit, also a really important point to highlight is that pests are deeply entangled with social injustices amongst human communities. As you share, “we associate pests with shame. We associate them with disease, with disgust, but if you actually look at where pests live and what pests do, the animals that we call pests proliferate the most in areas where the social contract has been broken." What do you think is important to highlight when it comes to how pest issues are related to injustices and economic disparities amongst human communities?

Bethany Brookshire: Thank you so much for naming that. A lot of people haven't really covered that when we talk about the book, and I think it's one of the most important takeaways, especially for urban pests such as rats. People don't realize that the hatred and disgust that we have for many of these creatures is because of the things they are associated with. They are associated with poverty. They are associated with failing infrastructure. They are associated with dirt and disease. And many of those things exist the most for people in poverty. 

I did a lot of reporting with unhoused populations. And it was very difficult to see how closely many of those people have to live with rats because it's very, very close. And we just kind of assume that that's what they deserve for being unhoused. No one deserves to live that way. No one wants to live close to rats. 

And I think it would actually kind of help us think of rats as a social problem and tackle them as a social problem if we saw them as an issue of social justice. 

Because often when we try to get rid of rats, we think of it individualistically. Like, you set traps, you set poison, we're gonna, you know, put poison in the park, or we're gonna put poison by your trash can, or whatever. Use a better trash can. What you actually need are better overall sanitation systems, right? Places where garbage is not left out overnight. Places where garbage can be very tightly stored. Housing for people who need it, housing that is tight and housing where they are capable of storing their food in places where rats can't get at it. These are social problems with social solutions. And I would like to think that maybe if we saw them as an issue of social justice for humans, maybe we would be a little more collective in our rat response.

Kamea Chayne: I also see this as kind of like an invitation to see any issues of pests as more like symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself. What are the underlying and deeper, broader context and conditions that led to the rise of this so-called pest issue? It’s the same thing with pesticides as well deployed in agriculture as kind of a “target and kill” type of approach to get rid of pests. If you saw it as the singular issue, then that might feel like the right approach. 

But if we kind of look at: what are the underlying conditions that are kind of allowing pests to really thrive in this particular environment? I think there are very clear differences between very biodiverse farm ecosystems compared to monocultures that grow the exact same thing across huge acreage where it's like a giant feast for the same species of insects and other pests that find that as their food source. So they're all going to congregate and populate a lot in that one area compared to other different quote unquote underlying conditions that might harbor a different, more diverse insect biodiversity that won't lead to the same issue of quote unquote pests. I don’t know if you would like to add anything to that. 

Bethany Brookshire: 

I think it does kind of help us to frame animals that we come to see as problems and understand that they are issues of our own making. 

One of my favorite examples of this is actually cats. And I say this as someone who has two cats. I love cats. Cats are responsible, at least partially, for the extinction of 63 species and counting. And that's because we bring them places because we like them and because they're good at getting rid of pests. We get them because they're good at it. And then we are surprised and horrified when we release the cats onto the landscape and the cats turn out to be really good at getting rid of a lot of things, including things that we like. 

And that’s where you end up with conflicts around what we believe about those animals as well. Because where we might, for example, drop tons of poison onto an island to get rid of rats, which is a thing that we routinely do, we would never do that to get rid of cats. Because we care about cats too much, because we brought them on purpose. Unlike the rats who stowed away, the cats were ours. I did a lot of study, a lot of research, around the cultural ideas of cats. And many societies are still very firm in their belief that cats deserve a right to roam, a right to go outside, and a right to eat birds. And so…

It's really fascinating to see how our love for an animal can complicate the story of the pest.

Kamea Chayne: It goes to highlight how subjective and cultural a lot of these things are. I'm also curious, how do factors like maybe distance from the animals of concern, maybe their rarity or population size and charisma and other things, how do these things impact people's perceptions of “pestiness” or something otherwise deemed worthy of extra protection no matter what?

Bethany Brookshire: So much. I have a whole chapter on African elephants in the book. And I went to Kenya to report on these animals. And I ended up speaking with and learning a lot from different members of the Maasai who live in the Maasai Mara, otherwise known as the Serengeti. And they talked to me a lot about their issues with elephants. Because we love elephants. We, as in the global north, adore elephants. Elephants are beautiful. They are the most mega of the charismatic megafauna,  they are large, they are wise, they are smart. They have obvious social structures that we understand. There's so many things about elephants that endear them to us. And so we want to see them preserved. 

But unfortunately, part of the way that we conserve these animals has been through some of the byproducts of colonization. So as I talk about in the book, the African elephant was preserved in Kenya by the setting aside of the national park system, which actually was originally developed when Kenya was a British colony. And when they set apart the national parks, they went in with global north British colony ideas of what a national park is. And to them, a national park is a place with no people in it. And so the Maasai were and are being forced off of their ancestral lands to make room for these parks to make room for these elephants. And what's interesting is that before European colonization, the Maasai never had problems with elephants. It wasn't an issue that they had. They were still herders. They relied heavily on their cattle. And so they didn't necessarily worry about elephants. The problems with elephant conflict arose because after the setting aside of these parks, there was also a movement to make the Maasai farm, to make them farm corn, to make them farm sugar cane. And humans love corn and sugar cane, and you know who else loves corn and sugar cane? Elephants. Because elephants have great taste. And that has been the start of some really extreme human -elephant conflict that is still going on to this day.

 [Elephants] cost millions of dollars a year in crop damages and kill more than 200 people per year in the continent of Africa. In Asia, actually the Asian elephant, I think is responsible for, I want to say six or 700 deaths per year. And the control and the kind of issue of managing these animals is further complicated by the fact that we in the global north still love them. We still love these elephants. And it's not to say that the Maasai do not also love the elephants. They have lived with these elephants all of their lives. They respect them. They have a deep understanding of elephant behavior much more than we do. 

Because of the kind of mores of the global north, we have forced the issue of human-elephant conflict…we forced it to begin, and now we're very much enforcing its trajectory in terms of how it is handled. 

So, for example, no one is allowed to just up and kill an elephant, and it doesn't matter if it's raiding your crops, it doesn't matter if it has killed your family members, it does not matter if it has trampled your house. None of that matters. You may not kill an elephant. If you do, even if you do it accidentally, you will pay the equivalent of millions of US dollars in fines and you will go to prison for life. Conversely, if an elephant kills a person, you can apply to the government for restitution. I did not speak to anyone who had actually received that restitution. It's a years-long process and you will receive roughly maybe a 10th of the price.

And so people in Kenya who live closely with these animals have become very bitter and they have good reason to be because in Kenya an elephant is worth more than a Kenyan person. Literally, financially that is true. And that's a tough pill to swallow. On the other side, because we in the global north care so much about elephants, the way in which they manage human -elephant conflict is very informed by the latest science, by Indigenous understandings of elephant behavior. So, for example, the Maasai have known for a long time that elephants don't like bees. They really hate bees, which you think that bees would not be a problem. But an elephant's nose is very sensitive and it's very long. And the bees, when they get mad, they will go up the trunk and they will sting inside the trunk. And African bees, they are angry. So the elephants don't like bees and they will run from bees. 

And so now farmers in Kenya are being paid and getting grants to set up beehive fences around their to kind of hopefully recruit bees to come and keep their crops safe. There are measures with elephant repellent. There is a group called the Mara Elephant Project that actually collars elephants and tracks them via Apple Watch and uses various techniques to drive them away from crops. So for example, they'll go out there in like four by fours and yell at them. They'll throw chili pellets at them. They'll strafe them with drones, because they sound like bees. And they'll even use a helicopter to kind of force the elephants back. And so these efforts are all very careful. They're all very non-lethal. And that's because of how we feel about those elephants. So it's a very complex and difficult and often really painful situation.

Kamea Chayne: With everything that we just talked about in mind, you name this overarching reflection, which is that something becomes pests when they challenge power. I would appreciate it if you can elaborate more on what this means and whose power and order of concept and concepts of human versus more than human are kind of really being centered here.

Bethany Brookshire: The theme of power, I found, was really woven throughout my research on pests. And it's very interesting to me, and I'm still sort of trying to figure out where our power -hungriness comes from. It's still out there. 

I think much of our fear and much of our hatred of animals that cause us problems has a lot to do with our sense of control, our sense of power, our sense of entitlement. 

And a really good example of that is actually the coyote. So coyotes have lived across North America for millions of years at this point. And Indigenous people lived with coyotes and never had problems with them. Coyotes are very, very important in many Indigenous societies and in many Indigenous traditional stories and life ways, in various ways. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, and sometimes they're more than both of those things. And it's really fascinating how coyotes have survived everything that colonization has done. And they're now starting to thrive in our suburbs and even in our cities. There are coyotes living in downtown Chicago. They live inside the loop. There are coyotes living in Los Angeles. There are coyotes living in New York City. There are plenty of them. They mostly live in the Bronx. But there are a couple that actually have lived in Manhattan. Coyotes are now everywhere. I think of them as a gas. They will expand to fill their container. They're omnivores, so they mostly want anything that's food related. They have no problem with fruit. They love fruit. They love vegetables. They love shrews. They love voles. They love birds. They love rats. They don't actually really love rats, but they'll eat pretty much anything. 

What I find fascinating is now a lot of coyote conflict that you see is in these suburban environments in particular. And it's because those coyotes are challenging people's sense of power and control. People think they have power and think they have control and think they know exactly what lives in their neighborhoods, exactly what lives in their backyards. And then they are very upset when they look outside and they see a coyote. 

And they are understandably upset when that coyote eats their cat or their dog or bites their toddler. These are incidents that happen all the time. And much of that stems from our idea that our yards are ours. And we should be able to let our dogs and cats just roam in them. We should be able to let our dogs out to go pee in the backyard and not have to look at them. Because our yard is ours, and so nothing is going to walk into it. And we become really, really upset when a coyote does walk into it. Because coyotes, of course, cannot read. They do not, you know, follow deeds or anything, and to them, a chihuahua is a Snickers. So it's a really interesting contest of power.

And you also see this play out with wolves in the West in particular and on a much larger scale there are farmers for example and ranchers who really do have problems with wolves and they are dealing with the idea that they want control over their environment. They want to be able to have you know their cattle or their sheep out grazing. And it's understandable why they respond the way they do when coyotes or when wolves come and take down some of those animals. It is absolutely understandable because, a lot of these farmers, we think of a lot of ranchers as being these big, hundreds of thousands of acres, you know, millions of head of cattle. But most ranchers are not that, most ranchers have small herds and, you know, losing one cow can make a huge difference to them.

And so it's very understandable that their sense of control is strong and their sense of outrage is justified. I understand why they feel that way and I understand why they react the way they do. At the same time, who died and gave us that sense of control? Where did we get the idea that we deserve to control every aspect of our environments? We deserve perfect safety from every living thing in our midst. It's just not necessarily a reasonable assumption. And so I think that's something that we need to think about, that maybe that control isn't serving us. First of all, it's not realistic. Animals are always going to come and they're going to take that control away. It's not realistic. 

I also think our idea of control isn't necessarily serving us well. It's kind of facilitating these conflicts.

Kamea Chayne: One of your invitations is for people to change our perspectives on pests, because as we mentioned earlier, our worldviews influence how we then manage and relate to and care for the world around us.

 I guess I'm curious to hear more examples of how different cultures have translated that worldview of animals not being out of place into action to manage some conflicts, even if these conflicts have arisen from the introduction of land privatization or urbanization or industrialization. How have different communities might be managing these so -called pest issues differently rather than this approach of just trying to kill and get rid of them altogether?

Bethany Brookshire: One of my favorite examples of this is actually from British Columbia. It's from the Great Bear Rainforest. And I got to speak with the chief counselor of the Kitasoo Xai'xais, his name is Douglas Neasloss He's really nice. And he was telling me about some issues that their community had had with black bears.

So basically they were having black bears that were coming into the town and they were eating fruit trees, they were eating garbage, they were going up to the salmon cannery and eating there. It was getting to be a problem, it was getting to be really scary. And so at first they called the Canadian government. And the Canadian government came in and shot the bears. And the Kitasoo Xai'xais went to the government and said, why did you do that? We did not want you to shoot the bears.

And they said, yeah, that's our mandate. If you call us, we need to shoot the bears. That's what we have to do. And so Douglas basically said, okay, thanks very much. You can leave now. And they sat down with the village and they said, okay, this is what's going on. 

Bears are very, very important to the Kitasoo Xai'xais. And they said, the bears aren't going to change, they're just being bears. What we need to do is change ourselves.

And so, for example, everybody in the village got a bear -proof trash can, a bear-resistant trash can. They moved the salmon cannery to be further away. They changed the way the salmon were processed and where things were left. And they got rid of every single fruit tree in the town. And the bears stopped coming because they changed themselves. Because they felt that these bears deserve to live here as much as they did. And it was up to them to change what they were doing to live in harmony with those bears. And I know they're not the only community that's done that. There are other communities that have done similar things. And I think it's really beautiful. It is a lot of work. It's a lot of ongoing work. But it's living with your environment and not against it.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for this example. At the beginning, we talked about how weeds are seen as plants out of place and pests are often seen as animals out of place, but that we need to interrogate who gets to define what place is. And you also shared that there's no word for pest in many Indigenous languages because animals are seen as belonging and not as out of place. 

But I also wonder if that comes from a particular context, as in, the bears and the wolves, once seen as pests that people now want to bring back, I assume have cohabitated and co -evolved in those places with native communities in those bio -cultural regions for centuries and beyond. 

But what if an introduced animal is now taking over and decimating wolf populations or these bear populations. is there a more grounded reason then to see those introduced species that are wreaking havoc as being out of place. I'm also thinking about my earlier example of the mongoose introduced to kill, to get rid of issues of rats, but now adding to the problem of native birds being devastated. 

I guess the underlying question is, is the deeper message not that we should undefine place altogether to just kind of be like “every species is right where they need to be and everybody belongs right where they are”. But to really question what place means or who gets to define that and maybe how we can ground that in something that honors the community dynamics of place rather than having it be just about some subjective or imposed dissociated power relations. What are your thoughts on that?

Bethany Brookshire: That's such a great statement. And there are plenty of situations in which animals are, I don't want to say causing problems because like they're just animaling, they're just doing the thing. But, a good example of this is Burmese pythons and the Everglades, right? They are causing massive declines in local fauna. Another example, cats in Hawaii [or Australia, New Zealand, the Florida Keys]. There are plenty of other examples. 

I just want us to think a little more deeply about why the animal is there, what it's doing and what it means. Because this is something that I've come to realize is another thing that we are making a spontaneous snap judgment about. So for example, when we introduce an animal and it thrives in a new area and it starts impacting the ecosystem in that area. We say that it is an invasive species. That is bad. It's got to go. When an animal reacts to climate change and moves north, changing its ecosystem, moving to a new area and begins to thrive elsewhere, we say that is a climate refugee.

What is the difference between those animals? It's the human, and it's also the human judgment. Right? And so I don't know the answer to these things. I don't. It is hard. And there are some areas where I do think if you want to save one species, you may need to kill another. I also think it's worth interrogating why you want to save that species. What makes what makes that species more important than the species that is taking it down? Often the answer is that they are rarer and therefore more important. And that's interesting.

Kamea Chayne: I think the underlying message here is to interrogate and be more curious and dig deeper to better understand the motivations and intentions behind a lot of things. And if something is labeled as a nuisance or as pests or as something that's unwanted, to ask why and what is it that we're trying to protect? And what are the motivations behind that? Or what are the cultural significance or other things that make that thing more of a priority to us than other beings?

Bethany Brookshire: I want to encourage, and also to think of why we are acting the way we are acting and what other options are open to us. So for example…

In many cases where we have an island that is under attack by rats, we will drop millions of tons of poison, but we won't do that for cats. And that implies that there was an option. So, I think that's something worth interrogating and worth thinking about.

It's also an opportunity to be curious, an opportunity to dig deeper and to see, you know, why certain animals are thriving where they are. What are the options for controlling those populations? As an example for the Burmese pythons and the Everglades, right now the current option to control Burmese pythons and the Everglades involves a machete. So basically, you have people who go out on the levees in trucks at night with lights and they hunt pythons. And they bring them in one at a time. There are hundreds of thousands of pythons in the Everglades. 

So it's worth interrogating different ways to do that. And there are scientists who are working on that right now. There's some really fantastic, interesting options. My personal favorite is called the Judas technique, but you can't call it that in Florida, apparently, because people think that's offensive. I'm not sure. Anyway, they call it scout snakes. Basically, you bring in a snake, and it especially works if the snake is a female, and you release the snake during snake mating season, because Burmese pythons mate in groups. And so then you follow the snake, you put a tracker in it, you follow the snake, and hopefully the snake is having a multi -snake orgy situation, and then you can bring in five snakes instead of just one. More efficient, still of limited success. The snakes will stop what they were doing when they see you coming. They're not that distracted. But I find it really interesting how often we respond to animals that are bothering us by just going, okay, well, great, how do we kill it? Not, how do we manage it? Or “what are we doing that's bringing this animal here”? And I think those are questions that we could ask ourselves a little more often.

Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate that you're leaving us with a lot of these questions to sit with because there is no formula or one size fits all answer for all of these different things? The answer will be so different for every specific context and every species that we're talking about. And I guess besides these questions, as we wrap up here, what else would you like to share that I didn't get to ask you about? And what are any of your final calls to action or other questions you'd like to invite people to?

Bethany Brookshire: There are so many amazing stories that I didn't even get to tell in the book. There are amazing stories of wildlife all around us, and one of the things that I think can help us reframe some of the animals that bother us. So for example, I opened the book with an example of my own personal pest. His name is Kevin. He is a squirrel. I hate him. Still around, still around. 

Kevin has made me look deeper at my environment to see what is attracting Kevin. What does Kevin want? What can I do to live better with Kevin such that Kevin does not eat every single one of my tomatoes? And I have been successful by learning more about Eastern gray squirrels and how they operate. 

And along with that, 

I have come to really appreciate these animals because so many organisms on this earth are endangered, they are going extinct, they are dying, and often it's our fault. And these animals, squirrels, rats, pigeons, cats, they are a success. 

Those animals are success on a planet full of loss. And you really have to appreciate their moxie.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more resources and references from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Bethany, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This was a very fascinating and fun conversation as well. So thank you so much. As we wrap up, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as Green Dreamers?

Bethany Brookshire: I would say that I want the word pest to go away because pest is subjective and pest is about our judgment. And so I would love for us to think of animals on their terms instead of on ours.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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