Mary Roach

One of Bookpage's Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2021 Join America's funniest science writer (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.

When Nature Breaks the Law

Fuzz

Patrick Book

There’s nothing Mary Roach can’t make interesting.

Adorable, funny and informative. Each chapter reads like a short story. Got a little lost in the agencies and acronyms but who wouldn’t!

Jessie Farris

So informative and funny. It reads like a documentary! It is a must read even for those not super interested in the natural world. It provides you with a new outlook on the natural world and how we interact with it! 

Brianna 

Matt Stein

My review: https://mattstein.com/books/fuzz

Gavin

Breezy but also contrived somehow. So like Bill Bryson: always on the lookout for an obscure fact and a dad joke. 

The premise is completely sublime: the collision of the natural and artificial, the amoral and moral, the obligate and voluntary. The tragicomedy of human dominion, at this tech level. A couple of the anecdotes pay off:


  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”…

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.

… an epidemic of car break-ins at Yosemite campgrounds. Between 2001 and 2007, eleven hundred automobiles were broken into by bears… It turned out that fewer than five bears—sows and their cubs—were behind the break-ins. This is typical. From the start of the year to the September of my visit, bears in Snowmass have broken into houses through unlocked doors or windows sixty times. Wildlife-camera images have implicated just four bears. A bear research scientist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Dave Garshelis, told me about a call he got from a National Guard camp where bears were raiding pallets of military rations called MREs, which bears apparently enjoy more than soldiers do. He was told that around a hundred bears were raiding the supplies. “The guy said, ‘I’ll bring you to this place where you look across to this ridge that is completely pockmarked with bear dens.’ I was like, ‘This sounds cool.’ ” The “dens” turned out to be natural landscape features, and “a hundred bears” in fact was three.

These elephants were not in the intention to kill,” Officer Raj says. How does he know? Because the bodies were in one piece. “If an elephant is in an angry mode, the body will not be intact. It will get in pieces.” A book by Jayantha Jayewardene includes a list of the nine recorded methods by which an angry or musth-addled elephant has killed a human being. “Placing a fore foot on one limb of the victim and ripping off the other with the trunk” is number 3. (Elephants use a similar anchor-and-pull technique to strip an uprooted shrub of limbs and leaves to eat.) Rulers of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1600s were said to have taken advantage of this natural behavior, training elephants to serve as executioners.

“The past decade has seen a minor epidemic of people plummeting from balconies because of monkeys. I found news accounts of six deaths in the last three years alone. Most famously, there was the 2007 fall of Delhi deputy mayor S. S. Bajwa. While taking the air, Bajwa was startled by a group of macaques set on storming the house to look for food. As he tried to stop them—or get away from them (there were no eyewitnesses)—he lost his footing and hurtled over the railing”

Crow-bombing, in fact, was a government-sponsored conservation effort. Who oversaw the bombing deaths of 250,000 Illinois crows during the winter of 1935? The Illinois conservation commissioner.

Because the birds were many, the cost of ammunition high, and the admiral budget-minded, the initial assault was done without guns. It took place in 1941 and is detailed in a Fish and Wildlife Service Special Scientific Report, under the heading “Large Scale Elimination Experiment.” Two hundred men carrying lengths of pipe or wooden clubs “spent 6 or 7 hours a day” hitting albatrosses on the back of the head. An estimated eighty thousand birds were killed... “The birds,” Hubert wrote in his memoir, “mostly sat quietly in place until clubbed.” Mable’s tapes captured only “the crack of ash on skulls” and, at one point, the distress cry of a young sailor: “I didn’t join the Navy to crush the heads of innocent birds.”

Still, neither Julie nor Sarah would say that gulls, as a species, are dickish.

Shaun makes his living from tourism but is by avocation closer to a naturalist. I don’t know the precise parameters of that calling, but I think that if you find yourself applying the word impressive to any variety of animal one.



But too much of the rest is dull travelogue and forced dovetails. Rather than track the sublime nonsense of concrete nature meeting abstract legality, she spends almost all of it hanging with scientists and forest officials, learning some words and spotting some danger. There is little law in it, nor in the topic: instead, ecology and popular opinion determine the creatures’ fate. Here’s the kind of ingenious foolishness I had hoped for a book of, the gerrymandering of morals in the face of an unreformable enemy you don’t have the heart to eradicate:


  India’s top agricultural pests also happen to be sacred animals. Elephants represent the deity Ganesh, and monkeys, Hanuman. The wild boar is an avatar of Vishnu. The nilgai, or blue bull, is actually an antelope, but gai means cow, and cows are sacred. When state officials wanted to begin culling the animal, they first pushed through a name change. Nilgais are now roj, or “forest antelope.”



Some pretty irresponsible discussion about ricin.

Was surprised when she said she had grandkids; her energetic, relentlessly informal, lulz driven escapades make her sound half her age.

  In a lush tropical environment, a bait has to be extremely tempting† to compete with the natural food sources. Aaron hands me a bottle of Goodnature bait, a chocolatey-coconutty goo that smells, but does not taste, delicious. It’s like eating suntan lotion, I tell Aaron.
“You tried it?” His look combines horror, confusion, and pity. “You want some gum?”



This seems wrong, from my long experience:

  people like me want to have their hamburgers. Only once or twice a year, I want to say. But I know that’s a lame defense. It’s not the quantity that matters, it’s the statement you make or don’t make. When you tell people you don’t eat beef—or would never use a glue trap—you make the alternative a little less comfortable for them.


Maybe if you’re the first vegetarian anyone’s ever met, and if you’re notably charming and undogmatic. But that’s an increasingly rare service.


Why am I disappointed at this being a perfectly good pop science book? Because the pop law book scarcely exists. It still has a dozen things worth quoting, that you can’t find in any other secondary text, and that’s rare enough for 3 stars.

Stacey Rainey 

I'm a fan of Mary Roach, she thoughtfully makes unusual topics interesting in her dry manner. Never before thought about whether gulls were dickish or not, but the term seemed apt in her use. This was a great break from a string of fiction.

Garrett Jansen

A bit of non-fiction for a strange topic, when animals "break the law". Despite the introduction, it's almost entirely modern although it zooms out to get a global view of some issues that I hadn't ever thought about in my own little bubble. Overall, a really fun read about the balance of nature and a healthy dose of optimism at the end that left me on a positive note.

Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law

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