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

331 Pages·2013·3.411 MB·English

by  Kelsi Nagy, Phillip David Johnson II

trash animals
HOW WE LIVE WITH NATURE’S FILTHY, FERAL, INVASIVE, AND UNWANTED SPECIES
Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II, Editors Foreword by Randy Malamud
Trash animals

Trash Animals
how we live wiTh naTure’s
FilThy, Feral, invasive,
and unwanTed species

Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II, Editors
Foreword by Randy Malamud
university of minnesota press
minneapolis
london
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2 520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-0-8166-8054-2 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8055-9 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to our families.
we appreciate your support beyond measure.
we also dedicate this book to all
insignificant, unwanted, or despised creatures of this world.

Contents
Foreword ix
Randy Malamud
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson II
I. The SymbolIc TrASh AnImAl
1. See Gull: Cultural Blind Spots and the Disappearance of the 31
Ring- Billed Gull in Toronto
Gavan P. L. Watson
2. Hunger Makes the Wolf 39
Charles Bergman
3. Beauty and the Beast 67
Catherine Puckett
4. Managing Apocalypse: A Cultural History of the Mormon Cricket 86
Christina Robertson
II. The nATIve TrASh AnImAl
5. One Nation under Coyote, Divisible 107
Lisa Couturier
6. Prairie Dog and Prejudice 124
Kelsi Nagy
7. Nothing Says Trash like Packrats: Nature Boy Meets Bushy Tail 139
Michael P. Branch
III. The InvASIve TrASh AnImAl
8. Canadas: From Conservation Success to Flying Carp 153
Bernard Quetchenbach
9. The Bard’s Bird; or, The Slings and Arrows of 171
Avicultural Hegemony: A Tragicomedy in Five Acts
Charles Mitchell
10. Fly- Fishing for Carp as a Deeper Aesthetics 182
Phillip David Johnson II
Iv. The UrbAn TrASh AnImAl
11. Metamorphosis in Detroit 201
Carolyn Kraus
12. Kach’i: Garbage Birds in a Hybrid Landscape 214
James E. Bishop
13. Flying Rats 221
Andrew D. Blechman
v. movIng beyond TrASh
14. Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird? 245
Bruce Barcott
15. An Unlimited Take of Ugly: The Bullhead Catfish 257
Kyhl Lyndgaard
16. A Six- legged Guru: Fear and Loathing in Nature 267
Jeffrey A. Lockwood
17. The Parables of the Rats and Mice 284
Kathleen Dean Moore

Publication History 291
Contributors 293
Index 297
Foreword
Randy Malamud
There is a range of nonhuman animals who are despised or feared
or mocked because we have constructed them as the disgusting “other” in
our anthropocentric fantasies of existence.
We like to imagine that we are in control of our homes, gardens, for-
ests, parks, landscapes, and urban spaces, and we are determined to serve as
gatekeepers, or wardens, adjudicating which species are allowed and which
are banned, which are prized and which are denigrated. These decisions are
often based on our prejudices, our taste, and our habits.
Cats, for example, are lovely, as long as they are suitably domesticated,
registered, or commodified. But a pack of feral cats in a junkyard, scrawny
and mewling, strikes us as verminous. Eagles and raptors circling overhead
evoke our admiring awe, while pigeons shuffling underfoot are shooed or
kicked away. Why— because they don’t fly as much or as high? Do we see
them as lazy? Do they lose cachet because they poop too much? (How much
does a pigeon poop compared to an eagle?) Do we denigrate some animals
because they’re too common, too adaptable to human society? Do we dis-
dain animals who proliferate too easily? Are we threatened by them? Are we
prone to fetishize the rarer animals, the eagles and pandas, precisely because
they are endangered and thus serve as evidence of our superior skills of sur-
vival over them, indicating our greater power, while we seem powerless to
control prairie dogs and rats?
In the essays brought together here, readers will note a keenly personal,
idiosyncratic, subjective focus embodying each individual writer’s own ex-
periences with a range of animals that have gotten the short end of the stick.
This is an antidote to the predominant unexamined presuppositions about
ix