Book Review: Trash Animals

Trash Animals: How We Live With Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted SpeciesEdited by Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson IIUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2013"It really isn’t necessary,” Ronald Rood writes in his piercingly good 1971 book Animals Nobody Loves, “that every plant and animal fit in with our scheme to be of value on earth. After all, a weary planet might well ask of Man, if it could, “What good are you?”The pugnacity of the question is equally visible on the great cover (handiwork of Cadence Design Studio) of Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson’s Trash Animals: there strutting right out of the image are two slightly bedraggled city pigeons, walking side-by-side down a sidewalk, intent on their afternoon errands, griping about the lines at their favorite sandwich shop now that the pretty people have ‘discovered it,’ worrying that the crosstown local’s air conditioning will be on the fritz again, not quite harried enough to neglect casting a hyper-aware and vaguely censorious glance at the camera. Their question is almost audible: “What good are you?”The new volume has some incidental overlap with the old; Rood dealt with such legendarily misunderstood creatures as wolves, rats, fleas, mosquitos, bats, snakes, spiders, vultures, pigs, and eels, while Nagy and Johnson’s writers cast a wider net, basically considering as ‘trash’ any animal that isn’t teetering on the brink of extinction in picturesque isolation. There are no bottlenose dolphins in these pages, nor polar bears, nor ibexes on windy tors. Instead, there are bullhead catfish, magpies, prairie dogs, killer house cats, rats in abundance, and a couple of pieces on the humble grasshopper – in one of which, Jeffrey Lockwood tries to parse the very bedrock code of what defines so many of these animals in the human imagination:

Psychobiologists maintain that disgust functions as an avoidance of pathogens and their toxins. As for the social constructionists, there must be a global, physiological conspiracy because disgust universally produces changes in blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance. I’m betting on a biological basis because disgust is invariably elicited by contact with stuff that is likely to cause illness such as bodily secretions, viscous substances, vermin, and sick or filthy people.

It’s certainly not all disgust, as a beautiful piece on coyotes by Lisa Couturier amply demonstrates. But any anthology that calls itself Trash Animals is almost invariably going to lean toward the creepy-crawly side of nature, and several of these essays take visible glee in putting the revolting stuff front and center, as when Catherine Puckett writes about rattlesnake venom:

By now, the rat may be dead, but no matter what, it is down for the count. Special enzymes in the snake venom are already at work in the rat’s body, helping the snake to digest the food before the snake has even eaten it. (One reason rattlesnake venom causes such problems for people is that it does the same thing to us – we are being predigested for the snake.)

Or, even more gloriously and revoltingly, there’s Carolyn Kraus’ hilarious free-for-all piece on cockroaches:

A cockroach won’t bite you, but if there’s absolutely nothing else around, he may nibble a bit at your eyelashes or fingernails. He keeps himself clean and his back continually polished while he lives off human filth and spreads it around in the process. Although he has been linked to polio, hepatitis, asthma, salmonella, leprosy, and bubonic plague, the cockroach actually considers you the hygiene problem. After exploring your hand or your sleep-quiet eyelids, he’ll lick his antennae, hooking them with a front leg and pulling them through his mouth to remove your skin’s oily residue.

There are only a few missed steps in this collection (Charles Mitchell’s piece on starlings in the plays of Shakespeare particularly seems to have winged its way in from some very different anthology); the vast majority of the pieces in Trash Animals are very good examples of what can be done with this sort of easy subject-matter, and two of the essays here, Charles Bergman’s “Hunger Makes the Wolf” and “Managing Apocalypse,” Christina Robertson’s meditation on crickets, are superb.And what about our cover animals, those busy, distracted urban pigeons? Of course the book couldn’t leave them out; they’re the subject of Andrew Blechman’s instant classic “Flying Rats,” in which he dissects, among other things, the peculiar animosity these hard-working birds seem to provoke in their fellow New Yorkers:

Hatred of pigeons has become so fanatical that one resident of New York City recently published a book graphically illustrating 101 ways to kill a pigeon, including “Grab a pigeon by the head. Twist until you hear a ‘pop.’ Grab another bird and repeat.”

The deepest underlying difference between this book and Animals Nobody Loves is also the most disturbing: the wider range of subject animals suggests some very dark trends that have deepened in the last forty years. A generation ago there were almost six billion fewer humans on the planet – and consequently more room for lots of other living things. Now, with the billions of humans reaching double digits, more and more kinds of animals are slipping under the heading of “trash,” and that’s saddening and alarming. As good as Trash Animals is, the reader hardly wants to contemplate its 2055 incarnation.