Book Review: Fuzz - When Nature Breaks the Law

Every single time I see a video or read a story about a zoo visitor who hops a barrier or does something else stupid that puts them at risk of injury from the animal, I always see the same comment made, usually the first comment - "And if anything that happened to this idiot, it's the animal who would have been put down."  The ghost of Harambe hangs heavy over all of these online conversations.

In reality, that's not always the case.  Zoo animals will be destroyed if it is deemed necessary to save a person who is in danger, but for that reason only.  We don't punish zoo animals or hold them to human laws.  We acknowledge that legality and morality are concepts that they don't understand, and we don't try to hold them to those. 

But what if we did respond?  Humans live in a society of laws.  How do we react in the face of other creatures that violate those laws - sometimes as a mere nuisance, sometimes with deadly results?

Science writer Mary Roach tackles the subject in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.  The title itself is perhaps a little misleading.  Roach opens her book with anecdotes of how, in the Middle Ages in Europe, it was customary for animals, domestic or wild, to actually be placed on trial with full legal representation for "crimes" committed against humans.  That's a fact that I'd only heard alluded to briefly in other settings and never read a full, in-depth exposition on, which is what I was kind of hoping this would be.  Instead, she glosses briefly over this and instead looks at a wider view of human-animal conflict in the modern world.

Sometimes, the conflict is direct and violent.  The first chapter deals with studying cases of predation of humans by pumas and bears in North America, followed later by similar case studies of leopards in India (which reminded me of the recent Netflix documentary I'd watched, Tiger 24: The Making of a Man-Eater).  It was interesting to read about the very different philosophies and responses that both humans and governments tend to have towards this problem on opposite ends of the world.  The chapter in India is joined by stories of other wildlife conflicts unique to that country, marauding elephants and thieving monkeys.  A good-sized portion of the book, however, deals mostly with more prosaic issues of wildlife as an agricultural pest, especially birds and rodents.  Other topics addressed include deer crossing the road and trees falling on people.

The first chapter - the bear and puma one - seemed to hold the closest to the the title of the book, in that it focused on the interplay of law enforcement and wildlife management (I especially found the discussion of forensics to be fascinating).  Most of the rest of the book, however, seemed a bit... cobbled together.  It was as if Roach had a series of articles or essays she'd written. all loosely themed around human-nature conflict (I'll admit that I found the tree chapter to seem especially shoe-horned in) that she'd bundled together and sent off to the publisher.  Her writing style is funny and engaging, but it didn't seem to form much of a cohesive narrative.

I think someone could write an excellent book about how we view animals as legally competent or responsible actors in our interactions with humans, stretching from the aforementioned legal cases of the Middle Ages (and were any humans ever tried for their crimes against wildlife back then?) to the modern era (reminding me of the recent elephant legal case in Colorado, which begged the question of who got to speak for the elephants?).  This just wasn't that book.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law at Amazon.com