Pests
How Humans Create Animal Villains
Bethany Brookshire
Having read it
★★★★★
A very readable book with insightful views and plenty of interesting examples and stories that are often laced with a little humour to help break a few barriers and assumptions down making for an approach which is accessible and informative about a subject that we are all actually a part of – making and supporting it – and, in my review of this book, Bethany has the last word...
If we want nature in our lives, want to live near the wild, we’re going to have to change how we look at ourselves. Only by understanding the animals around us, by learning what attracts them and what repels them, can we live with them, instead of against them. We cannot dominate and squash the world into the boxes of our preferences and definitions. But we can accept it, we can adapt. We can protect ourselves with knowledge – and stop going out looking for a fight.
A good passage
The very word ‘pest’ confers a type of ‘epistemic violence’, says Francisco Santiago-Ávila, a conservationist at Project Coyote and the Rewilding Institute. It gives people the idea an animal is out of place, unworthy – or at least less worthy than the other things in the area you want to save from it. The word helps us take away any tugs that animal might have had on our conscience. A pest isn’t part of nature anymore. It isn’t wildlife. A pest becomes an evil influence that must be eliminated, and the ends will now almost always justify the means.
A second good passage
Humans spread over the world, bringing their animals along, with little idea that as we claimed ownership, as we ‘tamed’ spaces, we would end up being responsible for what happened to them. Often, even as the planet warms around us, we still try to forget what we are responsible for.
We are responsible for the cats in our lives, even the feral strays. We are responsible both for their lives and for the deaths they cause. Whether we see them as a pet, necessary rodent control, or a deadly threat to biodiversity, they are where they are because we put them there. And now, as they threaten more species with extinction, we are faced with a choice. Who lives and who dies? Who gets honoured and who gets vilified?
A third good passage
It’s hard to see the water you swim in, the air you breathe. The culture you’ve grown up with. If you start assuming that humans are in charge, everything follows. If we’re in charge, we have the power to destroy – and we also have the responsibility and the right to fix whatever we have changed, in whatever way we have to. Our blindness to our own cultural biases also makes it easy to pick apart other people’s views of their ecosystems. Western scientists, Patterson says, ‘look at Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and they go, “but it’s all wrapped up in their cosmology, it’s all their religion.”’ But those same scientists fail to see their own worldview is just as shaped by their beliefs. Yes, Patterson says, Indigenous knowledge is wrapped up in cosmology, ‘but at least they’re honest about it.’