We learn why these animal attacks often show signs of scalping the victim: the human head is too large for their jaws, and their teeth simply slip across the skull. We learn how bears tend to be sloppy killers while cougars are more efficient.

This is where the importance of human-animal attack forensics comes in. Three years later, searchers found a dingo lair with remnants of the baby’s clothes. A woman claimed a dingo had taken her baby from the family’s campsite, but lacking a body or evidence, and with experts testifying that a dingo didn’t have the chops to carry off a ten pound child, the mother was convicted of murder. Or vice-versa, as in the famous Australian ‘the dingo took my baby’ case. As Roach points out, “for most of the past century, your odds of being killed by a cougar were about the same as your odds of being killed by a filing cabinet.” There also have been cases where an animal was wrongly accused, and the human murderer was able to go free. In truth, at least in North America, death by mammal attack is rare. The caterpillars evidently fled under the guise of butterflies.ĭeath or injury by animal gets lot of press, given the unusual and sensational nature, so to speak, of the acts. The book opens with a trial in 1689 in which caterpillars were ordered to appear in court for the offense of trespassing and stealing from people’s gardens. It seems there are some 2000 animal species in 200 countries committing acts that for them is just following instinct, but for humans is viewed as an egregious offense against our glorious selves. To write this book, she took a certified Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training, traveled to India to report on elephant, leopard and monkey assaults on humans and property, tracked cougars, stared down a bear foraging through dumpsters in downtown Aspen, watched a dying tree get its top third dynamited off, and so much more.

Roach in person at the Book Expo in 2010, I advised her to “keep having fun,” and she does indeed seem to be doing so. Mary Roach at the Book Expo, New York City, 2010 Her science is well-researched, her humor is outstanding, and the zeal with which she engages in participatory exploration is always fun. Let’s take a break from the heavier topics we’ve been covering lately in Nonfiction Views with a look at the interesting new book from Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. Roach has been entertaining us for years with her seriocomic science books with one-word titles: Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, and the three-word Packing for Mars, about cadavers, the afterlife, sex, eating, the military and space travel, respectively.

Fuzz mary roach