Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
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Average rating3.8
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. 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.
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Mary Roach books are always such an interesting perspective on topics we'd never think of ourselves.
I'm glad that my birthday gift to a friend ended up being a dupe, because I got to read this book. And I loved it! I've read the author's work before, and enjoyed her love of esoteric scientific topics, and her ability to make them accessible (fun, even!). It's rare to read a book that is so informative and also so funny. She has enviable journalistic talent delivered with such a delightful tone.
That, and I find this book's topic — humans attempts to deal with less-than-ideal encounters with animals (from the deadly to the annoying) — especially fascinating. She goes all over the world, from India to Italy to Colorado, to explore these animal-human encounters and all the varied and complex ways humans react (spolier: the problems almost always arise because we messed up the natural way of things, and by trying to fix it, we make it worse).
Definitely recommend this book, both for the writing and for buckets of fun facts to tell at your next party.
