Fuzz

When Nature Breaks the Law

Mary Roach

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781324001843
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

An Instant New York Times Bestseller
#1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller
#1 Indie Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller
A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Join "America's funniest science writer" (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.

What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.

Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter's Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.

Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature's lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• A Quick Word of Introduction
• 1. Maul Cops: Crime Scene Forensics When the Killer Isn’t Human
• 2. Breaking and Entering and Eating: How Do You Handle a Hungry Bear?
• 3. The Elephant in the Room: Manslaughter by the Pound
• 4. A Spot of Trouble: What Makes a Leopard a Man-Eater?
• 5. The Monkey Fix: Birth Control for Marauding Macaques
• 6. Mercurial Cougars: How Do You Count What You Can’t See?
• 7. When the Wood Comes Down: Beware the “Danger Tree”
• 8. The Terror Beans: The Legume as Accomplice to Murder
• 9. Okay, Boomer: Futile Military Actions Against Birds
• 10. On the Road Again: Jaywalking with the Animals
• 11. To Scare a Thief: The Esoteric Art of the Frightening Device
• 12. The Gulls of St. Peter’s: The Vatican Tries a Laser
• 13. The Jesuit and the Rat: Wildlife Management Tips from the Pontifical Academy for Life
• 14. Killing with Kindness: Who Cares About a Pest?
• 15. The Disappearing Mouse: The Scary Magic of Gene Drives
• Acknowledgments
• The Fuzzy Trespasser: Resources for Homeowners
• Bibliography
• Also by Mary Roach
• Copyright