Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species

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But instincts are just a part of the complex network of beliefs and idea that inform our relationship with animals. Our culture tells us which species we should love, hate, and eat. Then there are the conflicts between reason and emotion, our reliance on hunches and empathy, and our propensity to project our own thoughts and desires into the heads of others [meaning animals]. If we understand animals on their own terms could we then minimize or end conflicts with problematic wildlife or find a way to humanely end their lives when necessary? If, in fact, our false beliefs about a species are the cause for conflicts between humans and animal, might we find a better way to be neighbors simply by changing our minds?

The authors of the essays in trash animals are aware of the various taboos that cultural indoctrination breeds--Mormon crickets, a kind of locust, are harbingers of the apocalypse; magpies molest livestock; snakes are evil; and prairie dogs spread the plague--assumptions that may continue to prevail even if they are untrue. This shift in perspective from human to nonhuman animal allows us to analyze our behaviors in relationship with the animals realities from a less anthropocentric point of view. By looking at the animal's biology in conjunction with its natural and cultural history, some of the taboos fall away from some animals.

For example, Jim Bishop in his essay on magpies states that magpies may be beneficial to ranchers by removing ticks and other parasites from livestock and Kelsi Nagy discovers prairie dogs are victims, not carriers of the plague.

Other authors reveal some control methods used to reduce species populations are unnecessarily inhumane or flat out ineffective. Ultimately the efforts to control species may be more harmful to humans than the threat of the animals themselves. The violent campaigns waged against some insects, birds, and mammals, like coyotes all animals commonly poisoned , results in yet another manner of polluting the environment and ultimately our own bodies.

How we respond to conflicts with animals reveals our larger relationship with the environment as a whole. Other essays reveal the limits that science has as an objective arbiter of nature. Science cannot ultimately answer all our questions about value and management of species. Jeffry Allan Lockwood also shows us that disgust can be an aesthetic experience when he illuminates the life of the prairie lubber grasshopper, which has a rather disgusting escape tactic. Life is full of beauty, but it is full of feces, filth, and decay.

Lockwood shows us that even creatures that disgust us can lead us into wonder at the natural world. The essays in Trash Animals reveal that human relationships with animals, even animals that seem ecologically or economically worthless oftentimes, a harmful assumption or those that do us harm, can be imagined in new ways.

And if we can see animals in a different light, our ethics of engagement will most certainly follow. As David Quammen argues in his essay "The Face of a Spider," engaging in a moral dialogue about "insignificant" creatures is vitally important because these animals comprise the majority of animal life.

The first sections examine cultural and psychological constructs of species, in effect revealing more about human fears than of the animals themselves. The middle sections shift from the symbolic to the biological animal and ask whether conflicts with humans are unavoidable or are a result of unrealistic desires to dominate animals and environments.

The closing sections of the book focus on ways to re-imagine human relationships with animals regarded as having little or no value, suggesting ultimately that the concept of the "trash animal," not the animal itself, is what we should discard.

Trash Animals — University of Minnesota Press

Part One of the collection, "Association, Symbolism and Language: These essays make clear that it is human misunderstanding of animals, like the ring-billed gull, wolf, and Mormon cricket, which places them in the category of "trash. These essays construct the varied ways species come to be maligned and question if these animals deserve the consequences of human prejudice. Cultural Blind Spots and the Disappearance of the Ring-Billed Gull in Toronto," Gavan Watson asks the reader to consider the nature of our relationship with a species that is both ubiquitous and maligned, the ring-billed gull, although it is rarely called that.

Watson argues that though the bird is prevalent in the urban environment of Toronto the fact that residents of the city do not know the bird's actual name or its natural history makes it virtually invisible. This impedes a nuanced understanding of this species, creating a psychological distance between human and bird. In "Hunger Makes the Wolf" Charles Bergman asks, what ways do humans "need" animals we perceive as dangerous, like wolves.

In his personal quest to see wolves in the wild, Bergman interviews scientists, crawls into a den to come face to face with the wild animal, and presents a multitude of cultural interpretations of the wolf that includes wolf as mother, lover, nurturer, devil, sexual deviant, thief, insatiable hunger, symbol of the untamable wild, vermin, scourge, murderer. As such, the wolf has been much maligned. Even in one of the wildest and untamed places in the world, the Arctic, the author observes wolves scavenging at the dump, which fills him with a sense of loss.

The fact that wolves may harm the interests of hunters or livelihoods of ranchers makes them loathsome for many, but Bergman argues these conflicting creatures are necessary to our wild lands and our spirits. The wolf as metaphor resonates in our psyches in deep and meaningful ways that can't be quantified by science or sit easily in our domestic lives.

They connect us to the primal call of the wild, the wilderness within. Catherine Puckett looks at a creature more maligned than the wolf and equally endangered, the eastern diamond-back rattlesnake in her essay, "Eve in the Garden with the Serpent. Puckett looks at the cultural stigma surrounding snakes in the South informed by religion, myth, and family and recounts the harms that are inflicted on creatures that while poisonous are also "more polite than most people.

She also sees the snake as an ally, one who has a secret knowledge of the wilderness she loves. The rattlesnake is an outsider in its own habitat--as she finds herself to be--an unconventional Southern woman living with her husband's all too conventional family as she enters middle age. Christine Robertson asks the reader to deconstruct their fears and prejudices of locusts and questions if toxic campaigns to control these insects are warranted in her essay, "Managing Apocalypse: A Cultural History of the Mormon Cricket.

Robertson examines the history of insect eradications campaigns in the West, which continue today despite negligible results and toxic consequences up the food chain from birds, to predators and livestock to humans. Mormon crickets serve as a symbol for misguided land management policies and a silent apocalypse--the slow poisoning of our environment and unfortunately our selves. The Biological Trash Animal," reconsiders engagements with coyotes, prairie dogs, and packrats, and re-frames the nature of these conflicts from a biological and historical perspective.

These essays scrutinize the conventional way people view conflicts with wildlife and propose new ways of thinking about and handling inevitable conflicts with animals. Even though Couturier has never witnessed a coyote she identifies with the creature making a home in the urban and agrarian landscapes of the East. She is drawn to the creature to fulfill "A need. Couturier discusses the violence that is strategically enacted on coyotes by government organizations even though coyotes rarely molest livestock and serve as natural and free rodent control on the landscape.

As coyotes migrate east, filling the niche the extirpated wolves left behind, the author welcomes the wild and unknown into her suburban landscape and life. When Kelsi Nagy decides to turn her horse out on a pasture inhabited by prairie dogs she explores the national controversy surrounding prairie dogs. In her essay "Prairie Dog and Prejudice," she examines general perceptions of prairie dogs, which has caused people to assume these creatures are invaders that destroy the landscape, harm cattle and spread the plague.

Nagy learns that the prejudice surrounding prairie dogs has generated unfounded myths about these creatures that are actually an important part of the prairie ecosystem. Even though prairie dogs provide the only food and shelter for the most endangered mammal in North America, measures to control prairie dogs continue on public lands. Nagy reveals that imposed prejudices toward unwanted wildlife reveal imposed values toward wildlife that are difficult to overcome no matter how valuable prairie dogs are to the Great Plains ecosystem. In his essay, "Nothing Says Trash like Packrats: Branch does battle with the wily pack rats living in the crawl space of his desert home and challenges us to reconsider the kind of neighbors we make with wildlife.

Once packrats move into his newly built home outside Reno, Nevada, Branch looks to his own ignorance and agency in creating habitat for packrats. His solutions work with the animal's behavior, but not without first having blood on his hands. Even though a packrat can be considered one of the worst kind of invaders--a messy, smelly rodent that carries off house keys and baby pacifiers-- the author learns that there is a value to the rodent's hording behaviors. A native mammal in North America, packrats have been bringing artifacts of nature and now culture to their middens for centuries.

Their nests, some of them in continuous use for 50, years, are time capsules to the natural history of the Great Desert Basin and a treasure trove for climate researchers that use plant and animal artifacts preserved in ancient middens to analyze past climate trends. Branch concludes that these creatures have become the ultimate trash animal having turned trash--animal droppings, twigs, leaves, bones and berries--into scientific treasures, a window into the biologic past.

The essays in Part Three, " Mis Management: These essays treat animals that were too successful in acclimating, attesting to the unforeseen consequences of human attempts to manipulate the non-human world. The animals represented in this section--Canada geese, starlings, and common carp--highlight the current, politically and rhetorically-charged issue of "invasive alien species.

In "Canadas" Bernard Quetchenbach questions what it means to lose the wild rhythms of nature, like the migration of geese, and to have them replaced with year round resident geese. While wild geese bring to mind iconic images of wild nature and the rhythms of the seasons, resident geese are lumped into the category of nuisance animals with raccoons and gulls. Even birders make distinctions between migratory and urban geese. Like other nuisance species human activity led to year round populations of geese, byproducts of twentieth century hunters who bred captive geese as decoys.

Once released these semi-wild geese never took to the skies with their migrating kin and settled permanently in urban environments, fouling pristine and orderly sidewalks and golf courses. Quetchenbach looks closely at the dis-ease with which we live with Canadian geese and proposes, "the year-round presence of the once almost-exclusively migratory Canada goose testifies that our actions have far-reaching, unpredictable effects, causing apparently permanent disruptions in what we like to think of as serene, dependable nature.

A Tragicomedy in Five Acts. Today starlings are considered pests that disturb the peace with raucous calls, alfresco gatherings with bird droppings, agriculture and air travel. Half of all planes that hit flocks of birds crash into murmurations of starlings. While extreme measures are undertaken to control these much maligned immigrants, including heavy poisoning with a toxin often referred to as "starlicide," Mitchell wonders what we are fighting against when we wage campaigns against this successful alien species.

Starlings mirror the progress of human immigrants across the continent; they continue to thrive in our environments; and they are here to stay. Mitchell ponders the starling's role in a new world that we have adapted for our own use where starlings thrive through no fault of their own. Might they have filled the niche of other avian predecessors before them? Phillip David Johnson, II meditates on fly fishing for carp, invasive species, sport fishing, and what wilderness means in an increasingly post-pristine world in his essay, "Fly-Fishing for Carp as a Deeper Aesthetics of Angling.

Its reputation often clouds the fact that it was introduced in the United States to restock overfished, polluted waters in the wake of manifest destiny. Though the carp industry continues to thrive, the association of carp with the trash and marginal people groups remains. As sport fish, Johnson finds them worthy adversaries--big, strong, and difficult to catch. Fishing for them in irrigation ditches, farm ponds, and golf courses, he finds solitude that has vanished on the "pristine" yet crowded trout streams near his home in Colorado.

Ultimately, Johnson asks if it is possible to find value fishing for an invasive species in a "trashed" landscape and what we can we learn about other attitudes toward nature, wilderness, and our relationship with animals. Part Four, "Urban Environments: Citizens of the Post-Pristine," follows animals that thrive in urban spaces and take on the ambivalent attitudes people hold regarding cities. In places, these essays reveal the irony inherent when the biological success of some species would have never been possible without the city and other human-built spaces.

This last section challenges readers to look beyond cultural constructs that pit humans against animals or that place animals within anthropocentric systems of value. Carolyn Krauss examines exactly how far a pacifist can be pushed by the cockroaches that have moved into her home in her essay "Metamorphosis in Detroit. While cockroaches are a long time citizen of the planet and a marvel of survival, Krauss finds they have been loathed for centuries. For example, what we know to be the German cockroach was "called the Russian roach by the Prussians and the Prussian roach by the Russians.

See a Problem?

Enamored with the roaches fascinating biology, Kraus finds that it is easier to love the theoretical animal than the insects scurrying through her home. Some conflicts between humans and animals cannot be avoided no matter how many facts are known about them. In his essay, "Kach'i: During his tenure in a hyper- urban environment, Bishop finds wonder in these raucous birds, which, unlike North Americans, Koreans admire or see as auspicious omens of good luck.

Seeking nature in the city, Bishop discovers how magpies evoke nostalgia for the "wild" the city has replaced. Andrew Blechman analyzes the varied campaigns waged against urban pigeons, whose excrement is blamed for destroying a city's beauty, in his essay "Flying Rats," taken from his book Pigeons: While pigeons pose no more of a health threat than an average house cat, many people view them as vile and disgusting creatures. Like other "trash" birds, they are loathed for their ubiquity, their waste, and their ability to thrive in human built environments.

He finds that not everyone loathes pigeons. A handful of people are dedicated advocates to the plight of rock doves. For these modern day feral pigeon fanciers, the pigeon may serve as a symbol of their own outcast or misfit natures. If no peaceful way can be found to coexist with some animals, at least there can be much learned from a thorough understanding of the conflict, not only about the nature of species, but also human aesthetics, evolution, and the limits of moral thought and action.

In his essay, "Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird," Bruce Barcott writes about the controversy surrounding feral cats and asks some tough questions about the rights of individual animals versus the existence of endangered bird species. Barcott travels to Galveston, Texas to meet the most notorious cat killer in the United States, Jim Stevenson, an avid birder, arrested for shooting feral cats. An exotic species in the United States, house cats that have turned wild are the second leading cause of wild bird deaths in North America. As urban development creates island ecosystems, bird populations are becoming increasingly sensitive to predation by these unmanaged creatures.

Barcott asks us to consider if there are humane ways to manage feral cats and effectively save bird populations. David Quammen, in his essay, "Face of a Spider" examines his desire to "do no harm" when a nest of black widow spiders hatches at his desk. This unwelcome event makes the author confront a situation he would rather avoid and prompts him to ask the question, "How should humans behave toward the members of other living species? The basic process of animal life human or otherwise, do necessarily involve a fair bit of ruthless squashing and gobbling.

Conflicts with other species cause us to confront our duties to other species and our duties to our selves. Quammen proposes that before one take action against another animal, one should look the creature directly in the eye. Like offering the reader a Zen koan, Quammen proposes that an answer to our moral distress may be found in the face of a spider. Kyle Lyndgaard challenges our perception of a species most people find "ugly": Not only do these bottom feeders have an unsightly appearance, they also thrive in habitats with low oxygen and even radiation. We often disdain creatures that can thrive in the habitats we pollute and in the process vilify a species with impressive adaptations.

The prairie lubber is particularly unique in this category. The insect evades capture by vomiting and defecating on its captor, tapping into the deep and primal instinct of revulsion. Lockwood examines the value that this sensation, akin to fear, may have for humans. While science strives to sanitize our lives, experiences of disgust connect us to our instinctual natures. As much as we would like all our experience with nature to be clean, safe, and cuddly, "Nature is as likely to shit on us as embrace us.

Last, the closing head note by the editors and afterword by Kathleen Dean Moore, "The Parables of the Rats and Mice," pose a series of questions that bring obligations toward unwanted or insignificant species into sharper focus.

Trash Animals

What kind of philosophical moral paradigm shift would it take to allow non-human animals, even the rats and mice, into our moral spheres? Moore asks us to appeal to both our intellect and our emotion to live lives of compassion and deliberation toward all of creation. This is because our identity is intertwined with attitudes and beliefs about non-human animals we share our world with. For these reasons the Trash Animals collection will be of special interest to those who study human-animal relationships in animal- cultural studies, anthrozoology, geography, philosophy, environmental literature, eco- criticism, and animal rights.

The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture has dedicated three volumes to representations of insects in art, media, literature and human cuisine to date. And the books Insect Poetics 21 and Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature 22 both look at the way our understanding of insects and their communities has shaped how we use language and understand our own communities.

These species--rats, raccoons, mosquitoes and flies--confront us with our often conflicted perceptions of the natural world as well as attitudes about aesthetics and ethics, all vital to how we create and understand human communities and identity. As problems with pollution, extinction, and the loss of wild landscapes intensify, species that flourish in a post-pristine environment will continue to factor more prominently into discussions about animals, identity and worldviews. The Trash Animals collection adds to the growing conversation about conflict species in culture and opens the door for further conversations and scholarship in this field.

Questions about the literal and figurative space we make for animals are already being considered in this discipline. Human attitudes toward unwanted or problematic wildlife provide a conceptually rich topic of inquiry for this field. The vehement language used toward these urban dwellers reveals far more than the fact they are unpopular city residents. In the collection Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: These concepts also become less rigid and more fluid when we recognized that different conceptual maps have applied to human-animal relationships different in cultures and historical times.

For instance magpies are revered in Korea; in China carp are seen as both auspicious and delicious; pigeons, coyotes and starlings have all been revered at different moments in history. People of the Jain religion continue to recognize the moral importance of even the tiniest insect. Many of the creatures in the Trash Animals collection reveal the limits of human moral agency: Other creatures like invasive species such as carp and feral cats, that threatened the habitat or survival of other native species, reveal tensions inherent in the fields of Environmental and Animal Ethics.

Feral cats, a non-native species to North America are a significant factor in declining populations of some native birds. When philosopher Holmes Rolston, III is asked which species is of more value, he replies the suffering of an exotic feral cat is irrelevant to the survival of a native species. Is the suffering of feral cats truly irrelevant? On a practical level does this rationale appear moral or appealing to those who manage wildlife or volunteers who work with feral cats?

Questions like these are raised throughout the collection as invasive species come into direct conflict with the rights native animals and even problematic native species like wolves and prairie dogs make us question how humans assign natural value to certain species and not others.

While the topic of trash animals lends itself to creating philosophic dichotomies like this environmental ethics vs. The Trash Animals collection challenges readers to re-imagine our relationships with non-human animals and advocates for better, more intelligent, more humane management strategies. Environmental and animal ethics can play a central role in this endeavor. Return to Book Page. Kindle Edition , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about Trash Animals , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Jan 25, Lexidreams rated it it was ok Shelves: The introduction is a very well written social critique. However, it does not really match what follows. Most of the chapters are naturalist's personal accounts of their experiences with animals who have been deemed pests. In these chapters I was hoping to find more tips on coexistence and insights into how we come to physically divide up and share the world with other animals.

But it did not quite go in that direction. For one thing, the book bases itself mainly in the USA and entirely in the W The introduction is a very well written social critique. For one thing, the book bases itself mainly in the USA and entirely in the West. Multiple chapters had the writers showing respect for the 'trash' animals, but in the end they still drowned them in trash cans literally. The book does provide a couple insightful solutions for particular cases and a bit of humor see the chapter on the amusingly 'hardcore' pigeon movement of NYC but I wish it had delivered so much more.

Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature's Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species

This is not an animal rights oriented book, though those interested in the field may gain something from it. For example, in one inexplicable paragraph in the second to last chapter, a writer discusses his desire to foster in his students a disgust for social norms which romanticize nature, seeing such ideologies and "speak for those who can't" organizations as uncritically brainwashing people.

He believes by actually taking his students to experience nature they will make up their own minds, but of course also within the context of him specifically wanting them to deal with self-defecating grasshoppers whose only major value he believes comes from dissection. Recognizing and encouraging in your students "a willingness to outcompete, kill, hunt, or otherwise violently engage with other living beings" would seem to go against the themes and likely audiences of the book, but I guess it was deemed as appropriate???

He ends his chapter by stating, "In reference to hunting, Thoreau wrote, 'We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane while his education has been sadly neglected. Perhaps this chapter was included to provide an alternative perspective but if the book really meant itself as an attempt to critique and challenge the construction of animals as 'trash', I am flummoxed.

Unfortunately, multiple sections of this book seem to be another example of the ideology which finds that it's okay to take part in behavior which is under moral question as long as one speaks words of "honor" and "respect" while doing it. The book ends on an anthropocentric note, even as it seemingly attempts to encourage humans to act more morally towards animals, by implying that it is only humans who can act morally towards other beings or understand that they "ask something of them".

It was just well bellow my expectations. Oct 21, Kusaimamekirai rated it really liked it. I really enjoyed this compilation of essays about the animals in our lives many of us would rather forget. While most essays extol the virtues of animals such as the starling and the prairie dog, others acknowledge the menace of creatures such as cockroaches while still finding wonder in their existence.

A very engaging and well written book. I personally will never look at a starling the same way again.

Killenbeck rated it it was amazing Aug 12, Jonah rated it really liked it Sep 06, Danny Fritz rated it it was amazing Jul 20, Erika rated it it was amazing Apr 02,

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