Bethany Brookshire is a science writer and the author of the book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. She is also a host of the podcast Science for the People, where she interviews scientists and science writers about the science that will impact people’s lives. From 2013 to 2021, she was a staff writer with Science News magazine and Science News for Students, a digital magazine covering the latest in scientific research for kids ages 9-14. Brookshire’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and other outlets, and her voice has appeared on NPR, the CBC, WHYY Philadelphia and more. Brookshire has a PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the College of William and Mary. She was a 2019-2020 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.
EB: How did you start writing nonfiction in general?
BB: It’s a long and somewhat boring story, but the short and more interesting version is that I used to be a scientist. Midway through my grad career I took up science blogging, found I loved it and was kind of good at it, and kept it up as I got my Ph.D. and did a postdoc. Then, after flaming out of academia, I became a science journalist. So really, this is nonfiction, but this book is an act of science journalism, specifically.
EB: What drew you to writing about animals specifically?
BB: Well, I’ve always written about science. I love animals (who doesn’t), but my main focus is actually not animals per se, but how people relate to the natural world around us. What do we want (or think we want) out of our environments? How does it help or hurt us? And how does it help or hurt the animals that live near us? Those are the questions I’m really interested in answering.
EB: How did your book Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains come about? Why did you want to write about these more misunderstood members of the animal kingdom?
BB: It’s been a long road! I began to think about pests back in 2016, when I was reporting a study on the earliest known house mice. I became really obsessed with the idea that we’ve had house mice since we’ve had houses—and even before we ever tried agriculture. I began to keep an eye out for other animals that live near us, and I soon realized that every place I saw had a “rat”—some animal that just drove the people who lived there crazy. Sometimes it was a rat, sometimes a mouse, a pigeon, a gull, a lizard, even a giant snail. I quickly realized none of these animals were pests because of what they were. Instead they are pests because of what we are, what we want and believe about where we live. I wanted to tell the world just how subjective it all was.
EB: I really loved how you structured Pests with each chapter focusing on a different type of animal (rats, snakes, mice, coyotes, etc.). How and why did you decide to use this structure?
BB: Thank you! The structure took a lot of work. Each chapter does focus on one animal, but each pair of chapters is actually based around a theme—fear and disgust (rats and snakes), niche construction (mice and pigeons), belief (elephants and cats), power (coyotes and sparrows), and habitat destruction (deer and bear). I chose these five themes because I felt really encapsulated the ways in which we see an animal and label it a pest, and they help to show that it’s not about the animals, but rather about us—our actions and our perceptions.
EB: How did you figure out which animals to focus your chapters on? Because of the themes, each of the chapters often has tangents relating to other animals (for example, I loved reading about wolves in the chapter about elephants—how both elephants and wolves are romanticized by people who live far away from them and don’t have to deal with them on a daily basis), but how did you make the call on which animals would get their own chapters and which animals would be more supporting characters? This is basically a question about how do you cut down your research and figure out what to include and what to leave out? This is the thing I struggle with the most!
BB: Oh, this was the hardest part. I started with a pest list as long as my arm. And as I mention at the end of the book, honestly, so many other animals could have been the major examples. All animals we call pests could fit in all the themes to a greater or lesser extent. The ones I selected were the ones I felt had the strongest research to back them up. I looked for large bodies of research, people working in the area for reporting, and I also looked at species that had alternate perspectives surrounding them. For the more supporting characters, I looked for ways to show counterpoints to my main themes. So, for pigeons, which we used to love and now hate, I looked for something that people hated, that we now love, and found dogs in Ottoman Egypt. For elephants, which we in the West believe so strongly are harmless, I looked at wolves, which some are quick to believe are always harmful. No matter what, though, I made sure the research was there to back up what I was saying.
But there are loads of other animals that didn’t end up in the book. There’s a half chapter on crows that will never see the light of day, a huge section on deer and disease, and I’m dying to do something on feral hogs.
EB: I would read more about crows and feral hogs! I hope you keep writing about other animals. Also, side note, I have to say how much I loved the pigeon section as someone who has two pet pigeons.
So, I love nonfiction that is a blend of personal stories and reporting, and I loved your voice and presence as a character throughout. Opening the book with your own struggles with a pest (F***ing Kevin the squirrel!!!) made me trust you as a narrator right away, because you shared your own imperfect and flawed thinking about animals, which I think made me as a reader less defensive of and more open to thinking critically about my own mindset around “pest” animals. But I know that balancing personal and reported writing can be hard. How did you figure out how to move back and forth between the memoir-y bits and the research-y bits?
BB: This bit is definitely tough! I am a big outline fan. I outline everything, even my short news stories. I need to know where I’m going and what I need. I use a visual outline—I draw every chapter as a graph on a chalkboard (once a scientist, always a scientist). The horizontal axis is the wordcount, and the vertical axis is the rising and falling action of each section. I tried to keep in mind something I learned from a lunch seminar I went to with Michal Pollan. He described writing a book chapter as hanging laundry on a line. You need to hang all your laundry, but you also want to balance the heavier jeans and shirts with shorter, lighter socks and underwear so your line doesn’t sag.
So, for each chapter, I outlined the general structure, looked at the research and reporting I had, and then figured out what I needed. To balance the heavy science bits, I added socks and underwear of “color” from field reporting. That helped to keep it light (I hope).
EB: Did you have any misconceptions about any particular animals when you went into writing Pests? Did your writing and research change your relationship to animals in any way, or was there something you were particularly surprised to learn about one of your animal subjects?
BB: I can’t say that I had too many misconceptions, as I spent a year doing research, and quickly learned that you can never assume you know the answer when an animal is bothering someone!
But the thing I think I was most surprised to learn is just how little we know about many of the “pests” I wrote about. One of my sources said to me that we know more about the ecology of polar bears than we do about sewer rats. And she’s right! We know a ton about rats—but it’s often in a biomedical research context. When it comes to rats in the “wild”—the ones living with us—all we know is how to kill them fast. If we want a better solution to living with these animals, a solution that doesn’t involve us continually nuking them from orbit, we need to learn so much more.
EB: What do you think are some of the challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? What are some of the rewards? And, in general, what do you think the biggest challenges and rewards are of writing nonfiction, not just nonfiction about animals?
BB: Probably the biggest challenge when writing about non-humans is remembering they are not us. They do not think like us, they do not see the world the way we do. They do not even see simple concepts like safety, risk, or comfort the way we do! We are very quick to forget that, to say oh look at this bear, it wants to eat the same things we do, it’s so cute, it’s so like us. In a way, it is, but in many ways it isn’t. And we need to keep the bear’s point of view in mind when we think about ways to live with it. We need to realize that yes, they see cat food and dog food and garbage as food—and they’ll also eat the burned bits off your grill and all of your bird seed! Just because you can’t smell the food in your fridge doesn’t mean a bear can’t!
EB: Such a good point.
BB: But the biggest challenge, keeping their very non-humanness in mind, also leads to the biggest rewards. It fills me with awe and so much joy to know just how well a bear can smell, how fast a pigeon can fly, and how small a rat can become to get where it needs to go. It gives me absolute delight to see how these animals turn their talents to living with us.
EB: Why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?
BB: I mean, why is it important to read and write about humans? Or inventions? Or governments? We need to read and write about these topics because we need them to live successfully in the world. Well, if we’re going to live and coexist successfully in the natural world we live in, we need to read, write and learn about the other animals that live there. It’s not just for them. It’s for us.
EB: Who is another writer you admire who writes about nonfiction about non-humans? Do you have a favorite passage from a particular book or essay that you’d like to share?
BB: Oh, there are so many wonderful writers out there! I actually took a lot of inspiration for the structure of my book from Michael Pollan’s writing about plants in The Botany of Desire. I got a lot of inspiration for the journalistic structure from Maryn McKenna’s Plucked. But for this theme, I have to recommend Emma Marris, whose book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World, takes a philosophical angle to the question of how to work with the non-humans around us. I don’t have a specific quote to pull out of it, just read the whole thing.
EB: So many people have been telling me to read Wild Souls lately! I am adding it to my list right now. Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?
BB: There are two! H.H. Boots, Purrveyor of Dry Goods and Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. H.H. Boots has tall white hooker boots, a white mask, and extreme resting bitch face. She’s both sassy and sweet. She’s in the book. Eliza has a total of three teeth, and is a very round tabby who takes Boots’ constant efforts to put her in her place with stoic grace, even though she is easily twice Boots’ size and could probably stop this at any time, simply by sitting on her. They are probably sisters. Eliza is not in the book, but I did end up writing an article in The Atlantic about her adoption. They are both former strays that I scooped off my back porch, and now live a life of indoor luxury with heated beds, endless cuddles, and all the scratching posts and toys they can destroy. Unfortunately, Boots has developed extremely early onset kidney failure (she’s only seven), and requires daily fluid infusions, which she takes like a total champ.
Outdoors, there’s F***ing Kevin (the name encapsulates the now at least six squirrels living nearby), who I try my best not to feed.