There’s a mouse living in the vents of my house. I say one, but it was just one when my cat started sniffing the vents a couple of weeks ago, and when I saw it fumble its way through the grate late one night. By now, we’ve probably got a whole mouse family tucked cozily in there, having the run of the place from beneath our floors.
I think about this mouse (or mice) a lot, not just because I spend the vast majority of my day less than two feet from the place it was the one and only time I’ve seen it. And while reading Fuzz by Mary Roach, I thought about that mouse (those mice) in a different way.
The clash between humans and the fauna we surround ourselves with—and are surrounded by—is both frequent and frequently deadly for one or the other of us. We tend to feel the most prejudice over the encounters that cause our deaths, from rogue bears to deer or moose carelessly crossing highways where we want to drive our cars. These are the questions that propel the first part of Fuzz, and give it its subtitle: “When Nature Breaks the Law.” What to do with bears who just can’t pass up a buffet of garbage, and how to tell if wolves are responsible for a death? How do you manage co-existence with elephants or leopards?
Yet past those first few chapters, it becomes increasingly clear that the laws nature is accused of and often sentenced to death for breaking are not just fabricated by humans but exclusionary to most other creatures. The birds that eat crops are pests in need of relocation or execution. So are the rodents in our buildings (I say, eyeing the set trap that’s close enough for me to smell the peanut butter on it). We decide what is allowed to live where, and we don’t always get it right, as is evidenced by the horrifying “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”-like descent into invasive wildlife chaos that is New Zealand. Compounding all of it is that most often we are the aggressors, in that we are the ones who have shrunk their habitat or changed the landscape, or environment, in which they’ve evolved over thousands of years to survive and thrive in.
Roach’s writing is, as always, simultaneously sharp and wry, never letting a detail or a joke pass by unremarked. She’s also self-aware in her globe-trotting to see how different cultures and animals coexist (or not), recognizing how her human sensibilities might not be the most sensible ones in the cross-species conflict at hand. As with most things, the solutions often aren’t easily found and the problems are more complicated than they appear.
While I do think the subtitle is a little misleading to the meandering question Roach pursues, that question is now bouncing around my head like a fly against the glass—or a mouse inside a heating vent. Fuzz mostly looks at our interactions with other land-dwelling vertebrates, but the problems could easily extend to our insect and/or sea-dwelling cousins. So how do we treat our fellow animals, and how can we treat them better? Roach has a few ideas, and while none of them are easy or convenient, they’re worth considering.
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