Like, bears breaking into your house (your! locked! house!), unequivocally a bad thing. The book is full of emotionally contradicting stories like that, because this is a surprisingly tough subject. This is bad news for the thousands and thousands and thousands of rats, rabbits, stoats, and feral cats who will have to be killed to make it happen. This is good news for the the native animals and plants.
Apparently, for instance, the entire island of New Zealand is currently attempting to eradicate all invasive species from the island so the natural fauna and flora can bounce back from, in some cases, pre-extinction levels (this includes one of the world’s dumbest animals, the kakapo), but also the kiwi! And the yellow-eyed penguin. Badness for both the people and the animals, usually. But what this mostly ended up being was a tragic tale of what happens to animals when people move into their natural habitats and start fucking shit up. Well, there was some of that for sure! I did laugh at various points in this book, because you just can’t keep Mary Roach down. I anticipated laughter and cuteness and lots of stupid human animal conflict.
I fucking love animals! Even the ones most people dislike, like rats and spiders and snakes. And this book sounded so silly! And it’s about animals. I never read her last book, even though I tried and couldn’t get more than ten minutes in before waving the white flag, because reading about warfare and war and its consequences is something that I found actively unpleasant. I was so happy when Mary Roach announced this book, because I have been missing her writing.
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