Bethany Brookshire
speaker
250 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Jan
Bethany Brookshire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So it's not universal for specific pests.
Not everyone views rats as being uniformly disgusting.
Not everyone views snakes with fear.
So really, the concept of a pest and of something that's always going to bother us depends on whether or not we're going to let ourselves be bothered.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
would say that's that's definitely something that i found yeah the idea of what makes something a pest is about us it's about our desires and our beliefs about the environments that we live in and what those environments should contain and how would you define a pest i mean what what's your working definition
I really like the definition that Philip Nihas, who's a professor at, I believe, Colby College, put in a review in 2016.
He actually constructed this graph.
It's like a three-dimensional graph.
And basically, it measures how frequently we encounter an animal, how severe the encounter is, and how positive or negative it is.
So a very rare, very positive, very impactful encounter.
So for example, if I were able to go to Australia and snuggle a wombat, which is something I've always wanted to do, that would be a very non-pest encounter, right?
On the other end, you have your very rare, very negative, very impactful encounter, which is like a direct personal encounter with a grizzly bear.
Very rare, very direct, really a problem.
You probably won't survive, right?
Pests are where our encounters are very common, right?
slightly negative and not super impactful, right?
I think of pests as not coming for us directly, they're coming for our stuff.
Some of our stuff is like our trash or they're coming for our food stores or they're coming for our crops or our pets.
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