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
right they aren't attacking us they are attacking things that we value that are not us directly and that makes those encounters less severe but also we encounter them very very commonly right so it's common it's slightly negative and it's like low to medium impact
So it's not universal for specific pests.
Not everyone views rats as being uniformly disgusting, for example.
Not everyone views snakes with fear.
Not everyone views mice as being bad or pigeons as being gross.
Because of that differentiation, there are different ways to look at the world.
So for example, I was able to learn a lot and study with members of indigenous groups from various places around the world.
And in many of their cases, they do not have a word for pest in their language.
It doesn't exist.
And that's because to them, and I'm not saying like I know their beliefs, I don't speak on their behalf.
But what I understand is that because they see their relationship to the environments they live in differently, they do not perceive other animals in those environments as being a problem.
We as kind of the global north, the west, our dominant culture views two areas.
There are areas where humans are, and then there is wilderness areas where humans are not.
And that means that where humans are, animals that live in the wilderness should not be.
And where wilderness is, humans should not be.
And that allows you to say, well, if those other things should not be there, then they are pests, they are bad, and they should leave.
In many indigenous societies, they don't make that distinction.
They live in the environment with everything else.
And in that case, everything else does have a right to be there.
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.
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