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