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
It began in the 19th century, but it persists even now. Actually, people every year in the United States, in Mongolia and in Madagascar in particular get plague.
The bubonic plague is technically not a disease of humans. It is a disease of rats and fleas that happens to spill over into humans from time to time with catastrophic effects.
What we do know is that fleas get Yersinia pestis and then the bacteria forms a biofilm inside the esophagus of the rat flea. And the biofilm coats the esophagus so that the rat flea can't swallow. It's just biting and biting and biting and biting, but it can't swallow anything and it starves to death.
And you start to feel really bad for the flea until you realize that everything it bites, it's barfing up little bits of bacteria into the bite, spreading plague. So that's how plague is traditionally transmitted.
The fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us.
I'm the author of the 2022 book, Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains.
Oh, man. Pests, the word, does so much work in our society just in general. It has become a word for animals that are not where we want them to be. And that was one of the things that I became really fixated on, is the fact that the animals that we hate... Are so subjective. The animals are just being animals. They're about us.
They're about where we think animals belong and what we think those animals should be doing.
I don't know that it's been unfairly tarnished. I certainly think there was probably a place for it. I do think the fact that we're so quick to blame the rat says a lot about us because the reality is the thing that causes most diseases in humans, like communicable diseases, is other humans, right? We're the major vectors of disease to each other.
If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that.
The pigeon became domesticated around 8,000 years ago, we think, which makes it one of the earliest domesticated birds. Pigeons were cornerstones of many societies. They were incredibly important, not just for food, though we absolutely ate them. If you've never had squab, I highly recommend. It's delicious. We used them as messengers. And in fact, we decorated pigeons that served in war.
Pigeons were used to carry messages. And one of my favorite things is that pigeons were the foundation of modern journalism.
Yeah. How so? When the wire service Reuters started, it was not on a wire. It was on the wing. It was on the pigeon because Reuters figured out he could fly hot stock tips to and from Aachen and beat the train by two hours. And of course, we also use them for their poop. Because pigeon poop is excellent fertilizer and there's wonderful dove coats.
You can still see some of them today developed by the ancient Persians that are these beautiful bell shapes so that all the poop falls to the bottom and you can scoop it.
Yeah, there's a wonderful piece of work by Colin Jerelmack who actually documented the fall of the pigeon in the public eye via articles in the New York Times over a century. And he was able to document that over about 100 years, pigeons went from noble, innocent, beautiful to rats with wings. You know, we no longer needed fertilizer. We have chemical fertilizer now.
We don't need messengers anymore. We have email. And we don't need squab anymore. We have chicken.
I would say the history of the human-pigeon relationship differs in that we once had a use for the pigeon. I think of the pigeon as kind of the outdated cell phone of the animal world, right? We used to have such a use for them. And now we don't, and we can't fathom why they won't go away. It's so sad.
Well, there are plenty of downsides associated with rats. People don't like them. They find them both physically and psychologically really stressful. People who live very closely with rats, it's awful. No one should have to live that way. Rats give people feelings of unsettledness, right? They are very associated with our feelings of disgust.
And I'm saying that in terms of Western cultures, in terms of like the global North. Other cultures do not associate rats with disgust.
So the Temple of Karni Mata, it's located in Deshnokhe, India. This temple houses around 25,000 black rats. And those rats are considered sacred. They are holy. I got to speak to some of the people who help run the temple, who cook the food for the rats. It's a beautiful temple. It has solid silver doors carved with rats. There are beautiful marble floors for the rats.
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