Fuzz Read online

  For Gus, Bean, and Winnie. To the farthest star.

  Contents

  A Quick Word of Introduction

  1  MAUL COPS

   Crime Scene Forensics When the Killer Isn’t Human

  2  BREAKING AND ENTERING AND EATING

   How Do You Handle a Hungry Bear?

  3  THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

   Manslaughter by the Pound

  4  A SPOT OF TROUBLE

   What Makes a Leopard a Man-Eater?

  5  THE MONKEY FIX

   Birth Control for Marauding Macaques

  6  MERCURIAL COUGARS

   How Do You Count What You Can’t See?

  7  WHEN THE WOOD COMES DOWN

   Beware the “Danger Tree”

  8  THE TERROR BEANS

   The Legume as Accomplice to Murder

  9  OKAY, BOOMER

   Futile Military Actions Against Birds

  10 ON THE ROAD AGAIN

   Jaywalking with the Animals

  11 TO SCARE A THIEF

   The Esoteric Art of the Frightening Device

  12 THE GULLS OF ST. PETER’S

   The Vatican Tries a Laser

  13 THE JESUIT AND THE RAT

   Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life

  14 KILLING WITH KINDNESS

   Who Cares About a Pest?

  15 THE DISAPPEARING MOUSE

   The Scary Magic of Gene Drives

  Acknowledgments

  The Fuzzy Trespasser: Resources for Homeowners

  Bibliography

  FUZZ

  A Quick Word of Introduction

  On June 26, 1659, a representative from five towns in a province of northern Italy initiated legal proceedings against caterpillars. The local specimens, went the complaint, were trespassing and pilfering from people’s gardens and orchards. A summons was issued and five copies made and nailed to trees in forests adjacent to each town. The caterpillars were ordered to appear in court on the twenty-eighth of June, at a specified hour, where they would be assigned legal representation.

  Of course no caterpillars appeared at the appointed time, but the case went forward anyway. In a surviving document, the court recognizes the rights of caterpillars to live freely and happily, provided this does not “impair the happiness of man …” The judge decreed that the caterpillars be assigned a plot of alternate land for their sustenance and enjoyment. By the time the details were worked out, the defendants, having pupated, were surely through with their devastations, and all parties no doubt left the proceedings satisfied.

  The case is detailed in an unusual 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. When I first paged through it, I wondered if it might be an ambitious hoax. Here were bears formally excommunicated from the Church. Slugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of “smiting.” But the author, a respected historian and linguist, quickly wore me down with a depth of detail gleaned from original documents, nineteen of which are reproduced in their original languages in a series of appendices. We have the itemized expense report of a French bailiff, submitted in 1403 following the murder trial of a pig (“cost of keeping her in jail, six sols parisis”). We have writs of ejectment issued to rats and thrust into their burrows. From a 1545 complaint brought by vintners against a species of greenish weevil, we have not only the names of the lawyers but early examples of that time-honored legal tactic, the stall. As far as I could tell, the proceedings dragged on eight or nine months—in any case, longer than the life span of a weevil.

  I present all this not as evidence of the silliness of bygone legal systems but as evidence of the intractable nature of human-wildlife conflict—as it is known today by those who grapple with it professionally. The question has defied satisfactory resolution for centuries: What is the proper course when nature breaks laws intended for people?

  The actions of the magistrates and prelates made no rational sense, of course, for rats and weevils cannot understand property law or be expected to conform to the moral principles of human civilizations. The aim was to cow and impress the populace: look here, even nature must bend to our rule! And it was, in its way, impressive. The sixteenth-century judge who granted leniency to moles with young offspring made a show not only of his authority but of his temperance and compassion.

  Wandering through the Middle Ages and the centuries just beyond, I began to wonder what the modern epoch had brought to bear on these matters. Having sampled the esoteric solutions of law and religion, I set out to see what science has been bringing to the table, and what answers it might offer for the future. So began more wandering. My guides were people with titles unfamiliar to me: Human-Elephant Conflict Specialist, Bear Manager, Danger-Tree Faller-Blaster. I spent time with predator attack specialists and attack forensics investigators, builders of laser scarecrows and testers of kinder poisons. I traveled to some of the “hot spots”—back alleys in Aspen, Colorado; leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya; St. Peter’s Square the night before the pope’s Easter Mass. I considered the contributions of bygone professionals—the economic ornithologists and the rat searchers—as well as the stewards of the future, the conservation geneticists. I taste-tested rat bait. I was mugged by a macaque.

  The book is far from comprehensive. Two thousand species in two hundred countries regularly commit acts that put them at odds with humans. Each conflict needs a resolution unique to the setting, the species, the stakes, the stakeholders. What you have here is the highlights of a two-year exploration, a journey through a world I had not known existed.

  The first half of the book considers the felony crimes. Murder and manslaughter, serial killing, aggravated assault. Robbery and home invasion. Body snatching. Grand theft, sunflower seed. The perpetrators include the usual suspects, the bears and the big cats, and some less usual—monkeys, blackbirds, Douglas firs. The later pages explore acts less grievous but more widespread. We consider the jaywalking ungulates. The vultures and gulls that vandalize property for no discernible reason. The littering geese and the trespassing rodents.

  Of course, these are not literal criminal acts. Animals don’t follow laws, they follow instincts. Almost without exception, the wildlife in these pages are simply animals doing what animals do: feeding, shitting, setting up a home, defending themselves or their young. They just happen to be doing these things to, or on, a human, or that human’s home or crops. Nonetheless the conflicts exist, creating dilemmas for people and municipalities, hardships for wildlife, and material for someone else’s unusual book.

  1

  MAUL COPS

  Crime Scene Forensics When the Killer Isn’t Human

  For most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet. Snowplows kill twice as many Canadians as grizzly bears do. In the extremely uncommon instance when a North American human is killed by a wild North American mammal, the investigation falls to officers and wardens with state or provincial departments of fish and game (or fish and wildlife, as less hunty states like mine have rebranded themselves). Because the incidents are so rare, few of these men and women have much experience with them. They’re more accustomed to poaching cases. When the tables turn and the animal is the suspect, a different kind of forensics and crime-scene know-how is called for.

  Without it, mistakes are made. In 1995, a cougar was presumed to have killed a young man found dead on a trail with puncture wounds to the neck, while the true murderer, a human being, walked free. In 2015, a wolf was wrongfully accused of pulling a man from his sleeping bag and killing him. Cases like these are one reason there is WHART: Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training (and by its founders’ admission, “a
horrible acronym”). WHART is a five-day course—part lecture and part field training—taught by members of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service.*

  Because they have the experience. British Columbia has more cougar attacks than any other North American state or province. It has 150,000 black bears—to Alaska’s 100,000—17,000 grizzlies, and 60 predator attack specialists, 14 of whom (the specialists but not the bears) have driven down from Canada to serve as WHART instructors this week. WHART 2018 is being hosted by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which has offices in Reno. This fact helps explain why a training course for wilderness professionals would be held in a casino complex, where the resident wildlife amounts to the furry hominid on the Betti the Yetti slot machine and an unspecified “biohazard” that closed down the pool for a day. WHART seems to be the only booking at the Boomtown Casino event and conference center this week. Management has a bingo game going on in the next room.

  The WHART student body, some eighty of us in all, has been split into small groups, each led by one of the predator attack specialists. Like many Canadians, they are distinguishable from white Americans mainly by sound. I’m referring to that uniquely far-northern habit of ending statements with folksy interrogatives. It’s an endearing custom thrown somewhat off-kilter by the present subject matter. “Quite a bit of consumption and feedin’ and what-not, eh?” “Holdin’ on by two, three tendons, right, ya know?”

  Our conference room, the Ponderosa, is a standard offering with a podium and a screen for slides and videos. Less standard are the five large animal skulls sitting in a row on a long table at the front of the room, like participants in a panel discussion. On the screen, a grizzly bear is attacking Wilf Lloyd of Cranbrook, British Columbia. The footage is part of a presentation entitled “Tactical Killing of a Predator on a Person.” The instructor sums up the challenge that Wilf’s son-in-law faced in trying to shoot the bear but not the man: “All you could see was the body of the bear and a limb of Wilf once in a while.” The son-in-law saved Wilf’s life but also shot him in the leg.

  Another challenge: Marksmanship deteriorates under the influence of adrenaline. Fine motor skills are out the window. The thing to do, we are told, is to “run directly up to that animal, plant the barrel and shoot upward” to avoid hitting the victim. Though you then run the risk of “attack redirection.” That’s a calm, technical way to say that the animal has dropped its victim and now it’s coming after you.

  A second video illustrates the importance of order and discipline in the face of animal-attack mayhem. In it, a male lion charges a safari hunter. The other members of the hunting party wheel and scatter. The video is paused at various moments when a rifle is pointing both at the lion and at a hunter directly behind it. “Stay tight and communicate,” is the advice here. We will be practicing this kind of thing later, in an immersive field scenario out in the scrub near the Truckee River, below the casino.

  The cursor glides to the Play arrow again, and the lion resumes its charge. I used to work at a zoo, and the roaring in the Lion House at feeding time was God-like. It twisted my viscera. And that was just their mealtime conversation. The lion in this video means to intimidate and destroy. The bingo party has to be wondering what the hell is going on in the Ponderosa Room.

  After one more presentation, we break for lunch. Preordered sandwiches are waiting for us to pick up at a small deli over in the casino. We stand in line, attracting curious glances. It’s unusual, I suppose, to see so many uniformed law enforcement professionals inside a gambling establishment. I collect my lunch sack and follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”

  While we were off on lunch break, the instructors stacked the chairs against the walls and laid out soft-touch male and female training manikins on the tables, one per group. Working from photographs, some of the more artistically inclined instructors have used paint and, apparently, hacksaws to create convincing facsimiles of actual wounds from attacks. Wounds is a tepid word for what teeth and claws can do.

  My group’s manikin is a female, though it would be difficult to know this from what remains of her face, or from the sign attached to the table, which reads BUD. Later, walking to the bathroom, I pass a badly mauled LABATT and a decapitated MOLSON. Instead of being numbered, the manikin workstations have been beered. I take this to be an effort, a very Canadian-dude effort, to lighten the mood.

  Our first task is to apply our newly acquired forensics savvy and determine what species it was that did the mauling. We’re looking at what’s known in attack forensics as “victim evidence”: injuries and clothing. The worst of the visible damage is above our manikin’s shoulder. (Only one remains.) Part of her neck is flayed, and a flap of scalp hangs loosened, like peeling stucco. Missing eyelid, nose, lips. We all agree it doesn’t seem like the work of Homo sapiens. Humans rarely eat their victims. If a murderer removes body parts, it’s likely to be hands or head—to stymie matches with fingerprints or dental records. Murderers occasionally take a trophy, but a shoulder or lip would be an unusual choice.

  The consensus is that she was killed by a bear. Bears’ teeth are their main weapon, and their lightly furred face is their weak spot. When bears attack humans, they apply the tactics they use in fights with other bears. “They go teeth to teeth, right? So their instinct is to go right for your face.” Joel Kline, our youthful, forthright instructor, has been an investigator on ten cases of bear attack. “They come right at you and you have all these massive injuries right to the face.” Joel’s own face—our focus as we take in his words—is blue-eyed, unblemished, peachy clear. I work hard not to picture it in that state.

  Bears are inelegant killers partly because they’re omnivores. They don’t regularly kill to eat, and evolution has equipped them accordingly. They feed on nuts, berries, fruit, grasses. They scavenge trash and carrion. A cougar, by contrast, is a true carnivore. It lives by the flesh of animals it kills, and thus it kills efficiently. Cougars stalk, well hidden, and then pounce from behind and deliver a “killing bite” to the back of the neck. Their molars close like scissors blades, cutting flesh cleanly. A bear’s mouth evolved for crushing and grinding, with flat molar surfaces and jaws that move side to side as well as up and down. Wounds made by bears’ teeth are cruder.

  And more numerous. “Bears are more bite bite bite bite.” Our manikin, says Joel, is how it usually goes. “It’s a big mess.”

  Looking around at the manikins, I see not just bites and scratches but broad scalpings and skinnings. Joel explains the mechanics of this. A human skull is too large and round for a bear or cougar to position between its jaws and get the leverage it would need to crush or bite into it. So when it brings its teeth together, they may skid off the skull and tear away skin. Think of biting into a very ripe plum, how the skin pulls away.

  Deer, a popular entrée among cougars, have longer, more muscled necks than we have. When a cougar tries to make its trademark killing bite on a human, its teeth may encounter bone where normally there would be muscle. “They try to dig their canines in and they bring their teeth together and they take the flesh and remove it,” said WHART co-founder Kevin Van Damme, in a talk called “Cougar Attack Behavior.” Van Damme has astronaut looks and a voice that carries to the back of the Ponderosa Room without a microphone. I opened a decibel meter app on my phone at one point and was impressed to see him hit 79, about the level of a garbage disposal.

  The claw marks on our simulated victim rule out a cougar. Cats’ claws, unlike dogs’, create a cluster of triangular punctures as they sink in to grip their prey. With a bear attack, you’re more likely to see what we have here in front of us, the parallel rakings of a
swipe.

  Joel takes a step closer to the manikin’s head. “ ’Kay, what else do we have here? Missing nose, lips, right? So later we’re going to think of looking for those in …?”

  “The bear’s stomach,” a few of my group mates call out.

  “Stomach contents,† right on.” Joel says “Right on” a lot. Writing the chapter later, I would recall “bingo”s, too, but that may be a memory that seeped in from the other side of the wall.

  None of the manikin torsos in the room are laid open. There’s none of what Van Damme calls “feeding on innards.” I’m initially surprised by this. I know from research for a previous book that predatory carnivores tend to tear into the abdomen of their prey straightaway to get to the organs—the most nutritious parts. One possible reason you don’t see this as much on human victims, say our instructors, is that humans wear clothing. Both bears and cougars avoid clothed areas when they’re feeding or scavenging. Perhaps they don’t like how the cloth feels or tastes, or they don’t realize there is meat underneath.

  Joel indicates a suite of wounds on the neck and shoulder. “Are we thinking perimortem or postmortem?” In other words, was our victim alive or dead as these wounds were inflicted? It’s important to know this, because otherwise a bear that was just scavenging could take the fall for a killing. Based on the bruising around the puncture wounds, we judge them to be perimortem. Dead people don’t bleed or bruise, a bruise being essentially a bleed beneath the surface of the skin. If blood is not being pumped, it doesn’t flow.

  Joel tells us the story of a gnawed-upon corpse that was found near its car in the woods, partially buried under leaves. The bites appeared to have come from a bear, and a bear was trapped nearby, but there was little blood on and around the man’s body. Investigators found needle marks between the toes and a used syringe on the car floor. An autopsy confirmed that the man had died of an overdose. The bear, as Joel says, “just saw an opportunity to get some good, high fat and calorie content” and pulled him from the car and ate some of him and cached the body to come back to later. The bear was released.