Animals you hate that are actually awesome - with Bethany Brookshire

You know when you see someone on social media and you just KNOW they'll be amazing to chat to? Well, that's Bethany Brookshire for you.

Bethany is a science journalist, animal behaviorist and author who writes about the animals most people hate. Rats, cockroaches, spiders, pigeons... And how our feelings about them are mostly cultural, not scientific.

We talked about where fear and disgust come from and how cute a mouse eating a fruit loop is.

Also, how US science funding is collapsing and how bad that's going to be long term, why postgrad burnout is real, and how she wrote a brilliant book.

Transcript

Brianne
Kia ora, welcome back. I am very excited about today's guest. Bethany Brookshire.

I always expect people to either ignore me or just laugh at me. And she said yes, which, yeah, surprising. She's awesome. Her name is Bethany Brookshire and she is a science journalist. She is, well, she's a retired scientist. You'll understand more in the pod. But she's someone who's made a career out of questions.

Brianne
She studied biology, philosophy, brought it all together in looking at the way we categorise and live with different species. She's written for the likes of Science News, The Atlantic, a whole bunch of scientific magazines you'll have heard of, but she does a lot of science communication on Instagram

Brianne
and she does a really cool series called the Insomniac Anatomy Academy. Highly recommend you go and follow her. Details in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me, Bethany.

Bethany
I'm so glad to be here.

Brianne
Thank you for having me. I specifically wanted to find someone who was an expert in, I don't want to use the term gross, but animals people don't like. And then you came up and then I started stalking you all over the internet. And I was like, this person is fricking amazing. I need to talk to you. So I emailed you and thought, she didn't say no, definitely not.

Bethany
And then you responded. I was so excited, so thank you very much. I'm very excited. I'm always here for people who are here for like, gross, in quotes, animals. And yeah, the animals that most people hate, I am here for anyone who wants to talk about those.

Brianne
We might be here for a while then. One of my favourite pictures I found of you, again, this sounds super creepy and stalkery,

Bethany
was the one where you've got a rat, I think, on your head, you've got one crawling over your shoulders, you're so cute. Pit rat? Her name is Magrat. Yeah, well, was Magrat. Rats don't live very long.

Brianne
Oh, no.

Bethany
Yeah, so that photo was taken in 2022 and she was actually older then. You can't actually see it, but she just had some minor surgeries because domestic rats are often, they're very subject to large tumours, benign tumours. And so she'd had a bunch removed and her fur had mostly grown back. So she was mostly camera ready,

Bethany
but she's actually, she was a friend of mine's rat and she was so great. Like rats normally cannot control when they pee or poo. And she held it the whole time. Like we were taking photos for a solid 45 minutes and she did nothing.

Bethany
Aww.

Bethany
She was genius. She was so lovely. She's the sweetest little rat.

Brianne
I've heard they really are surprisingly lovely pets. I've always wanted one, but the short age thing has put me off because I can't go through constant heartbreak. It'd be hideous.

Bethany
There's that, and also I have cats. Ah, wouldn't go well. Well, I've seen videos of them snuggling together and, you know, possibly faked photos. No, I mean, it does happen. There are exceptions to every single rule, but on average, rodents find the smell of like carnivores and predators stressful. So it's not even personal. It's not like, it's not personal.

Bethany
It's just the smell of a predator is stressful. It's a thing actually when I was a scientist that we used to do to cause stress. We would put the odour of a predator near the animal and it was a reliable stressor.

Brianne
So, okay. So is a predator, you said carnivore, are we classed as a predator? And if so, what do you mean by smell? Is there a particular, is it a byproduct of digesting meat? Is it a whole bunch of different pheromones? That is probably more complicated, but what does that smell, what is it?

Bethany
So I'm not sure that we do count as a predator and it's very possible they're just really adjusted to us. It is also possible that in a laboratory setting, we are seeing animals that are stressed all the time because they are always around humans and we just consider that to be baseline. That is absolutely possible. I say this as a former mouse person who studied mice, but certainly the ones we used were cats.

Bethany
So I actually would have a cat, my former pet cat who has passed on, I now have other cats, sit on a t-shirt and I would bring the shirt in and like put it in front of the rats. Or like we use, you can buy fox odour and that's specifically fox gland odour. So that is a specific smell and oh my goodness that is that is the worst. That is stressful to everyone, humans included, because it just smells so bad and it gets in your clothes and it gets in your hair. And oh, oh my God.

Brianne
But they're so cute.

Brianne
Oh, I would kill for a fox.

Bethany
Well, they're trying that experiment in Russia. So you may be in luck sooner or later.

Brianne
Okay, I don't know if I want to go down that track, but this is already fascinating. However, I want to talk a little bit about you so that people have an understanding of who you are and where you came from. A lot of people ask how you get into, this is gonna sound a bit harsh,

Brianne
but how you get into really interesting careers within science. And I think most people would say working with animals is particularly interesting. So what is your career background? What did you study at school and then at university? And did you always want to play with gross in quote marks animals or how did that evolve?

Bethany
I always tell people my life is an entire story of failing upwards or at the very least failing sideways. I always did love science. Like I was one of those children. I went to a nature based summer camp when I was a kid. Literally, it was a camp where it was so nerdy.

Bethany
You had to take classes every day. And like the classes, starting at age 12, were things like botany, mammology, herpetology, and you had homework and you had like tests. I loved it. I loved it.

Brianne
I would be so on board. That sounds amazing.

Bethany
It was so fun. Hey, in herpetology, one of our final assignments was clearing out the copperheads from under the girls' bunkhouse. So it was awesome, all right?

Brianne
Okay, I'm surprised they allowed you to, but that would be so cool. Snakes are, yeah, anyway.

Bethany
People don't understand, but snakes are just so beautiful. They are stunning and fascinating. But yes, so I always wanted to do science. In college, I actually ended up doing biology and philosophy. I really loved philosophy. Actually, I was, I concentrated in logic and I really, really loved it. Ethics can absolutely bite me. I mean, I do a lot of ethics work and I dislike every minute of it, but I can understand that. But I really loved science and I was really interested in ecology and I was doing ecology research and I remember going to my mentor at one point and I said, I really want to

Bethany
be an ecologist. I want to go to grad school in ecology. And he was like, okay, so listen, your grades are terrible. And I was like, fair. And he's like, they're not good enough to get into graduate school in ecology.

Bethany
I was like, oh. He was like, but your test scores are really good. I was like, all right. And he's like, and the National Institutes of Health has just doubled the budget. So their standards are really low.

Bethany
So you can probably get into graduate school to cure cancer or something.

Brianne
There's a lot in there.

Bethany
There's so much in there. There's so much in there. And I went, okay. And I went into graduate school in physiology and pharmacology, studying drug addiction in particular. And this is not to say that this was like a sec, I mean, it was a second choice, but I did love it. I really did enjoy it. It was incredibly fascinating. It was interesting. It was compelling. And I did that for about 10 years, but it turns out I'm not a very good scientist. And so I ended up being unable to get grants and flunking out of the tenure track in a truly spectacular fashion.

Bethany
But in the meantime, when I'd been in graduate school, I was like, I'm suffering from, there's this thing that you go through in grad school after you pass your quals that we call the post-quals slump, which is where all of your experiments just stop working for no conceivable reason. This happens to, as far as I know, literally everyone. And yeah, so I was going through the post-quals slump,

Bethany
nothing was working. I was like, maybe I need to find another career. And I happened to go to a seminar on alternative careers and I sat down with an editor from Scientific American and I was like, hey, can I write for Scientific American? To his credit, he did not laugh in my face. So, you know, I love the boldness. What can I say? I have the self-confidence of a mediocre white man. So he did not laugh in my face, but what he did do was he was like, maybe you should get some experience first. And this

Bethany
was in a period where science blogs were kind of having a moment. I started science blogging back when that was a thing you could do. And it turns out I was good at it. And I got better at it. And during graduate school, and during my postdoc, I actually was writing three days a week. And so I was building up this kind of base of work and kind of like learning my way around science writing.

Bethany
And more importantly, I was making connections with people who were professional science writers and science journalists, which was not a career that I knew existed. Like as a child, I did not know.

Brianne
No, that's true, actually.

Bethany
Yeah, it's not a thing you learn. And it's funny because I read National Geographic like an absolute little nerd the entire time, but no one ever said, hey, these are journalists and that's a job. Like that never, never came up. But anyway, I was learning my way around. I was making connections. And so when I ended up leaving academia, I did do a very, very short stint as an intern in government science, which led me to understand that I do not respect authority enough to work in government. I didn't think that was going to be complimentary.

Bethany
And then I landed a position at Science News, writing for Science News Explorers, which is their children's magazine. And they were wonderful. They trained me up. The people there are still my mentors, they're still my colleagues. And so from there on out, I've been a science journalist

Bethany
and I was specialising at first in kind of biomedical science because my degree is in neuroscience. But I quickly was able to branch out and like go back to my original love for ecology and for human wildlife interactions. And so eventually I got a fellowship at MIT to pursue writing a book proposal about human

Bethany
wildlife conflict. And here we are.

Brianne
Long story short.

Bethany
Yeah.

Brianne
Yeah. It's amazing. My favourite genre is exactly what you've written, right? It's nonfiction done in a storytelling way. Is that a specific, are we calling it science? I'm going to call it science story, so you're going to tell me it's got a name.

Bethany
I would call it narrative non-fiction. Yeah, okay. Well, I like a bit of alliteration. The idea for it started in 2016. But then I wrote the proposal to get the fellowship in 2018. I was in the 2019-2020 class at MIT, which if you know what happened in 2020, if you know, you know, but anyway.

Brianne
Does anybody not know?

Bethany
Maybe some people were lucky enough to sleep through it. I don't even know. But anyway, I spent that year learning how to write a book proposal. I spent that year also taking a bunch of classes at like MIT and Harvard and like doing interviews and studying. And then I wrote the book proposal and then I got the book deal.

Bethany
And then they said, hey, great, your draft is due in 18 months. And so then I wrote it in 18 months, and then it was about nine months from then to publication. So yeah, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Brianne
Yeah. I had an editor approach me a couple of years ago and said, you know, we cobbled together some ideas, and then I panicked at the idea of committing to a deadline. So I'm all power to you.

Bethany
I love deadlines. Oh, of committing to a deadline. So I'm all power to you. I love deadlines.

Brianne
Oh, you're one of those.

Bethany
Well, I don't love them, love them, but I need them to the point that I give myself deadlines.

Brianne
Right.

Bethany
And I'm also that person who like, I graph all of my, like, progress. And like, there's a spreadsheet for everything.

Brianne
I'm that person. No, whatever gets you, whatever gets your stuff done, I guess. Yeah, I'd like to do it at sort of nine o'clock the night before it's due.

Bethany
That's fair, that's fair. I mean, that's how I write the news, so.

Brianne
Oh, well, you kind of have to, because I guess it's at the moment, right?

Bethany
When I write science news pieces, it's like two hours to deadline, I'm like slamming away. Yeah. That wouldn't be much more stressful than being a news journalist.

Brianne
Particularly, I was going to say particularly at the moment actually, but I'm trying to think of a calm moment.

Bethany
No, I would say particularly at the moment.

Brianne
Yes.

Brianne
I wasn't going to talk about, this is completely off the topic of my list of questions, what is the science environment like in the US at this moment?

Bethany
Uh, it's dark. It's dark. It's sad, actually. It's really sad.

Brianne
It's horrifically sad. It's, it's enraging. It's I don't know. It's a lot of words, but is it something that you see as repairable? All of these grants have been cut

Brianne
every time you go on whatever various social media platform there's another scientist or another group and chunk of people who have been let go, or their grants, you know, I don't need to repeat it, but do you think this has set science and knowledge back? Or do you think at the end of this term, it will go back to normal?

Bethany
I mean, I'm not a science policy person. I'm also no longer a practising scientist. So I can't fully say, but I can say that with the cuts to National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, we are cutting an entire generation of scientific talent off

Bethany
just saying, go do something else because there's no grants to support those graduate students. And you have to understand that part of the reason people are able to go to graduate school for the sciences is because it is paid. It is not paid well, right? But it's not like, for example, taking out a loan to go get a graduate degree in film or business. Like,

Bethany
it is paid by the government. And that is really, really important, especially for people who are underrepresented in science, right? Because it means you can support yourself while you learn how to be a scientist. And it also means that you're working on, you know, this is not just a gift. You are working on projects that benefit the country, people's health, the world. And that's been cut off in a really terrifying way. And I think it's going to have really long-term knock-on effects for the environment and the ecology of the

Bethany
United States. I think it's going to have really negative long-term effects for health, not just for, you know, Americans, but for everyone. And yeah, I think the turnaround is slow, right? You don't, this is a giant cruise ship of research and you do not turn it on a dime, right? I think it would take years, years and years.

Brianne
I should stop asking questions I don't want the answer to. Sorry. The cruise ship analogy is a good one. You cannot turn something on and off and expect it to be quick.

Bethany
Yeah. And it's sad for a lot of people who aren't not just Americans. I mean, we train a lot of people from overseas, you know, to be scientists. And I would like to think that that's been a net good for the world. I mean, it has its downsides, obviously, like nothing is perfect. Everything has downsides. But yeah, it's a lot to think about. And of course, meanwhile, media is like suffering under similar onslaughts. And so a lot of the journalists who would cover this are, you know, getting laid off. So that's its own issue.

Brianne
It's an attack on all fronts, right?

Bethany
It feels like it sometimes.

Brianne
Yeah, however, I choose to be, sometimes, delusionally optimistic.

Bethany
Like pests, we will rise, we will survive.

Brianne
Yeah, totally, yeah. Call us the cockroaches. People don't like cockroaches. I don't know why.

Bethany
Interestingly, there's always this idea that cockroaches would be the ones to survive like the nuclear winter or whatever. It'd be like—

Brianne
Oh no, don't take this away from me.

Bethany
And it's actually not true. The cockroaches would not.

Brianne
Okay, are you saying nothing will? I mean, microbial life?

Bethany
Oh no, it's not that. It's that the German cockroach in particular is well adapted to cities because it's well adapted to specific ranges of temperatures that are maintained on the inside of buildings. And so if you lose people to maintain those buildings' temperatures you're going to have a massive plummet in the lifestyle of the German cockroach. It's nothing to do with like cockroaches not being tough. Cockroaches are very tough. Big salute to the roach.

Brianne
I don't understand the fear of them because I quite like beetles, but in saying that, I've maybe seen two in my entire life. We've got native ones here, and I saw one in my, this is gonna make my house sound horrendous.

Brianne
You know what, I don't care. I rewild. I live on a fair bit of land. And the boom in wildlife and insects and birds in just three years is phenomenal.

Brianne
Oh, that's lovely.

Brianne
It is, it's the most amazing place to go and stand outside. And yeah, but sometimes they come on inside, which is mostly fine, unless they are, I don't know, a spider bigger than whatever, an inch and a half. So what, what's that for?

Bethany
We also, we have a spider-sized cutoff in my house, where if I see one that's like smaller than about like a large coin, I'll just look at it and be like, I didn't see you, you didn't see me, we're just gonna keep going,

Bethany
no one else needs to know that you were ever here. But if they're bigger than that, other people are gonna know. And like, it's not so much me, it's the other people in my house who will know that the spiders are there but no I can tell you I'm from the southeast

Bethany
of the United States and when you get down in South Carolina we have a thing called palmetto bugs which are a native type of cockroach and they are very large they can be about the size of the palm of your hand, and they fly.

Brianne
Oh, shit.

Bethany
And they fly at you.

Brianne
Why?

Bethany
Um, because they're not very bright. They're just kind of dumb. Like, it's, you know, they're just, they're bumbling. They're bumbling big guys.

Brianne
If only they were furry, they'd be cute.

Bethany
But yeah, I understand why people feel the way they do about roaches.

Brianne
Yeah, OK. If one of those flew towards my face, I would probably have a mild response, shall we say.

Bethany
Yeah, you haven't lived in South Carolina till you've had a palmetto bug in the face.

Brianne
I know someone from there. I'm going to have to ask him. So how was that experience as a child? Okay, yeah, spider size is quite important. I just, I'd be a lot happier with them because I live next to Australia, right? So I've seen big, yeah. I really, really wish I wasn't frightened of spiders.

Brianne
It would make, I'd be much happier, but.

Bethany
Yeah, huntsman's.

Brianne
Oh God, I saw one in a car once and I had. Oh, I know. And I do a lot of road tripping on my own around Australia and I live in fear of one running across the windscreen and I'm in the middle of the outback because I'll have to leave my car. And then I'll be the person in the news, the idiot who left her car when that's the thing they say not to do,

Brianne
but then I'll be like, well, there's a spider in it.

Bethany
I mean, what can you do? they're terrifying, but also I always look at them and I'm like, wow, is that the size limit for like oxygen exchange when you don't have lungs? Like my scientist brain immediately starts going to, wow, how much bigger can they be?

Brianne
The biggest is a Goliath bird eater, right? And they are—

Bethany
They're chunky. Chunky boys.

Brianne
So they live in a— No, they're not Australian, are they? You do get bird-eating spiders in Australia. I don't think it's the Goliath there. Maybe it is. I don't know. I'm not a spiderologist. A retinologist is not as cool as spiderologist.

Bethany
That's true. I do know a spiderologist.

Brianne
Oh, oh. Do they keep them?

Bethany
I mean, professionally. I don't think personally.

Brianne
Okay, that's fine. University and I live in fear of finding out where it is, I have a vague idea and I just stay off that floor just in case.

Bethany
Oh, see, I think that's awesome. I would love to see that.

Bethany
But I'm that person. Anytime I find out somebody has like a lab or cool stuff in the lab, I'm like, can I

Brianne
see it?

Brianne
I worry that I'll go in there and I will not cope very well. And then you get over it and you warm to it, but then they say, okay, would you like to have, because they do have like a phobia breaking spider for lack of a better term. So they have a beautiful tarantula crawl across you. And I imagine that would be amazing.

Brianne
I think tarantulas are adorable. The little paws, oh my God. And objectively, it sounds fabulous. But what if, you know how you have that instinctive, and you just throw it and they shatter, oh, I'd feel horrific. So I'm just destined to be scared.

Bethany
Well, that's actually something I end up actually going into in my book is that, you know, there is a feeling of disgust and fear that people have around animals like spiders, but also snakes, that to some extent is actually has a deep psychological explanation to it. We think it's evolutionary.

Bethany
It's not. Oh, it's not evolutionary. It is learned, but it's learned in part because of the way we live in the world. So like, for example, when you're a baby or a kid, you're very used to seeing things that walk on four legs or two legs, right? It's like birds get two legs, right? Dogs, four legs,

Bethany
humans, two legs, and so forth. And so you're used to that. And you're used to the gaits that are associated with that. You're used to that kind of movement, right? You know what that movement looks like and you become very comfortable with what that movement is. When you're looking at spiders, extra legs, too many legs, some might say, and the gait is very different. And it often startles people. You'll have a startle response because the gait is different.

Bethany
And the same is true for snakes, right? Because they are slithering, obviously, no legs. And you will have a startle response because you'll be like, oh my goodness, that's moving in a way I don't expect. And startlement can become joy and it can become fear. And it kind of depends on who's around you when it happens. So they have done studies actually, I think

Bethany
it's Vanessa Lobu has done a wonderful set of studies at Rutgers with parents, basically they spied on a bunch of families in a reptile house and they like listen to the parents talk about the animals. And so like, they would go up to like a Komodo dragon and they'd be like, oh, look at this. The Komodo dragon's gonna come and kiss you.

Bethany
The Komodo dragon's gonna lick you with a little tongue. You know, it's like, oh, isn't that cool? It's a dragon. And then they saw a snake and they were like, Well of course that would make perfect sense. Right? And you're very young.

Brianne
So it becomes an intergenerational fear.

Bethany
Yeah, yeah.

Bethany
And even if they're just joking, it's still something that can really get into, you know, and it's present in media too, right? How many evil figures in media are described as snake-like?

Brianne
Jafar. I don't know why he's the first one that comes to mind.

Bethany
Because the answer is, all of them.

Brianne
Yeah. Yeah. Voldemort.

Bethany
Yeah. Yes. Even has a snake.

Bethany
A perfectly nice snake, who is very wronged, in my personal opinion. But... Agreed. Well, there's a few things in that book. Well, yeah. But also, there's, you know, I mean, it goes back to the Bible. There is a snake in the Bible. I will have to admit my ignorance here.

Brianne
Never read it, but.

Bethany
Oh, so Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden.

Bethany
Eve goes to this tree she’s not supposed to eat from and the snake’s like, “Oh my God, have you tried this fruit? It’s delish.” And Eve’s like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine,” and so on. Fall of man. Yes. Well, I would believe a talking snake if it told me to commit murder, I probably would.

Bethany
Fair enough. It’s a snake. Very cute, right? But there’s this whole idea of historical enmity. And that doesn’t have to be the case. There are religions and traditions that respect snakes and honour snakes. And that doesn’t mean they don’t have a healthy respect for dangerous snakes, because you’d have to be a fool not to, right? But they have a respect that’s not necessarily

Bethany
based in fear. It’s a cultural thing, not biological. I found that really fascinating.

Brianne
Yeah, I always assumed it was because we evolved — thought it was something any species living where harmful spiders were would have. But then I wondered, why am I not frightened of snakes? Same deal.

Bethany
There are studies on this. There was this idea monkeys were congenitally afraid of snakes, hardwired. But studies show monkeys raised in the wild are absolutely afraid of snakes. Monkeys raised in captivity? Meh, not afraid — until they’re exposed to monkeys raised in the wild.

Brianne
How interesting.

Bethany
Then the wild-raised monkey sees the snake and reacts, and the captive monkey picks it up. It’s cultural transmission.

Brianne
That’s so cool. Okay, so you wrote a book — I’m excited! I bought it on Kindle even though I hate reading on Kindle — don’t know why. Also bought some giveaways, trying to manipulate you into coming on the podcast, sorry. It’s a fascinating insight into why we’re frightened or repulsed by some animals, and why we shouldn’t be, the wider context and all that. Fair?

Bethany
Yeah, also about animals we don’t hate, animals we love even though they cause similar problems. Like rats, pigeons, snakes — but also elephants and cats. I even talk about cats specifically in Aotearoa.

Brianne
Ooh, that’s a fraught topic here.

Brianne
It’s a hard one, because feral cats do untold damage. I read an article a while ago, was terrified to publish it — if we can’t talk about this with nuance, we should all go home. What did you find?

Bethany
It’s complex. Cats are obligate carnivores, live prey specialists. If it moves, they’re invested.

Bethany
Cats kill for fun. It’s established — they kill even when they don’t need to.

Brianne
Not just cats, right? Other animals do too.

Bethany
No, definitely not just cats. It’s tough because these biological behaviours cause harm. Cats contributed to the extinction of 66 species and counting, some here in New Zealand. But I have cats too — and cats I pulled in from outside. Stray feral monsters I trapped indoors until they settled and were okay.

Brianne
So you domesticated a feral cat (or several)?

Bethany
I’d say stray rather than feral — neighbourhood strays, eating cat food but also sparrows. One basically walked into the house, like, “This looks nice.”

Bethany
I was like, “This looks like a woman who’s going to spend thousands on my health care.”

Brianne
Yes!

Bethany
I adore cats. I get how hard it is — if you own a cat, you want the best life for it. Many cultures believe the best life is outdoor access to hunt and roam.

Bethany
That’s disputed. Lots of research shows cats can have fulfilling lives indoors. I’m pathetic — my cats live indoors with access to a large outdoor enclosure.

Brianne
Sometimes called a catio — a big thing here now.

Bethany
I have a screened-in porch — basically a catio, yes.

Brianne
Brilliant.

Bethany
Good idea, but not everyone can afford that. In the South, lots of houses have them, but many places don’t.

Brianne
To keep out palmetto bugs.

Bethany
Yes, or mosquitoes — ours get real bad.

Bethany
So I get why people let cats out. Some believe cats must express natural behaviours like hunting. Cats were originally pest controllers, mousers, that’s part of why we invited them in. People want those effects.

Bethany
But it has knock-on consequences. It’s tough in Australia, here in Aotearoa, and in the US where there’s a huge feral cat population causing similar problems.

Bethany
I looked into TNR — trap, neuter, return. Trap cats, neuter them, then release them to live out their lives. It can work but you need to neuter 89-90% of cats, which means catching nearly all of them. A massive effort, takes about a decade. Lots of species don’t have a decade.

Bethany
Cats highlight our feelings about other animals. I found many stories of predators introduced to islands. Rats, for example, get dropped on islands from boats and multiply, causing seabird losses.

Brianne
That’s human intervention, right?

Bethany
Yes, rats on boats. Rats spread plague — which is why ships had cats, right?

Bethany
Some ships definitely had cats.

Brianne
Lucky cats.

Bethany
Yes and no. Cats and rats don’t fight as much as people think. Cats prefer smaller prey; rats are big. Studies in Manhattan show cats and rats coexist politely — fewer rats when cats are around, but rats still present, active when cats aren’t.

Bethany
So rats end up on islands often, causing damage to seabirds. Conservationists don’t hesitate to drop poison, lethal traps, use BB guns — whatever it takes to kill the rats. Predator Free 2050, for example.

Brianne
Which doesn’t include cats — and it’s just been defunded.

Bethany
Oh no, yeah, government here isn’t great either.

Bethany
Anyway, they’ll do anything to kill rats, but cats are different. When it’s a cat, people do everything to protect it — trap, neuter, relocate to giant outdoor catios for ferals, anything but kill.

Bethany
Difference between cat and rat is one letter and taxonomy — but mostly our feelings. We hate rats, but love cats. Fascinating human psychology.

Brianne
Why is that? Disease? But cats spread disease too. Emotions not tied to facts or logic.

Bethany
Much more cultural. Love and respect for cats near us. Rats associated with disease, dirt, poverty. Cats in media are happy, well-fed, playful. Those associations change how we see them.

Bethany
I also looked at lab mice and rats, used in research partly because we hate them and feel okay about that.

Bethany
Ethics involved — not fun.

Brianne
Did an environmental ethics paper — ultimate question: does any of it matter? Philosophy is fascinating but frustrating.

Brianne
I get why you loved the topic, but ethics suck.

Bethany
Yeah, fascinating — just try not to feel anything.

Brianne
I lost my emotions years ago.

Brianne
Rats and lab mice testing was a big reason I wanted to be a microbiologist. But I realised I’d be a terrible scientist — not keen on paperwork, methodical repetition.

Bethany
I was good at that, hated grant writing though. I was mainly animal behaviour focused — loved training mice.

Bethany
Training by rewards — giving a mouse a Froot Loop. You know Froot Loops? Little sugary rings? Mouse trying to eat one is like a human eating a car tyre — huge! But the mouse is determined, eating around the edge, breaking through the centre.

Bethany
When finished, the mouse is measurably larger, little tummy full, flopped out with no regrets. So cute!

Brianne
We’ve all been there.