Title: Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W.W. Norton Company 2021
Genre: Nonfiction - Nature Writing
Pages: 308
Rating: 4/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Winter TBR
What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.
I always enjoy Mary Roach’s brand of science writing, and this volume is no different. I’ll admit that this one is a bit more serious than her previous works. It’s hard to poke fun at animals killing people. But there are a few laughs here and there, mostly pertaining to human reactions to animals behaving badly. We get in-depth chapters on specific animals or groups of animals. We get to see how humans have affected the environments of animals and how those animals have reacted. Sometimes those interactions result in death, but sometimes they just result in annoyance. There’s a wide range in this book. I think I found the chapter on macaques the funniest and possibly the most informative. An overall well-done collection of chapters on the topic. Can’t wait to see what she writes about next.
