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
The rats drink from beautiful decorated bowls of milk, huge bowls of milk. They eat a wonderfully healthy diet. They get whole wheat, bread, like whole bran. They get fruit, vegetables. And people come to make fire and food offerings to these rats. It's because the rats are not considered to be real rats. The rats are reincarnations of people.
So the legend is that this woman, Karni Mata, grew up in that area and she grew up to be a sage. She had mystical powers. And so when her sister's son passed away, he drowned while playing, her sister brought her the boy and begged her to bring him back. And Karni Mata interceded with Yama, the god of death. And Yama said, okay, the people from your family will no longer die.
They will be reincarnated as rats. And then those rats, when they die, will again be reincarnated as people. And so now that temple, the family does still worship there, and it has been several hundred years. But other people, devotees, worship there as well because they believe that they will also be blessed if they are devoted enough to be reincarnated as these rats.
I would say there are a couple of things. There is one angle that's very cultural, right? I ended up interviewing for my book a bunch of people who worked in biblical scholarship. We ended up talking about translations and our understandings of things like Genesis. And God gave people dominion over the animals.
And that has become very deeply ingrained in many of our cultural ideas of what we should be able to control and how we should be able to control it. I would say that's one of the reasons that we hate these animals is because we expect animals around us to fail. We are prepared for that.
We move into an area, we pave it over, we put up a Walmart, a Target, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, what have you, and we expect the animals to leave. And then we wring our hands. We are so upset. We have killed off this beautiful species. This species becomes beautiful. It becomes charismatic. It becomes this wonderful thing. And look at the horrible stuff we've done to it.
But when an animal is still there, we're kind of mad. We don't like it. It's now where we've decided it doesn't belong, even if it always lived there. Now it's our space. You don't belong there anymore. And we get really upset, especially if the animals begin to thrive and especially if they thrive off things we value, right? Our gardens, our crops, our cats. We really hate them.
We hate their success because their success feels like our failure, right?
That's actually something I got a lot when I was writing the book is it's humans. Humans are the real pests. We're the ones invading the world and taking it over and making it awful. I think that's too easy because it's the sort of thing that makes you fling up your hands and be like, oh, there's nothing I can do.
We have choices in the way that we treat other animals and we have choices in the way we treat each other. And we don't need to live the way that we always have.
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