photo of brown ratAdrienne Ross Scanlan wrote a review of “Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains” by Bethany Brookshire for the New York Journal of Books. Brookshire explains how cultural perceptions, changes in human society and human philosophy assign negative or positive attributes to animals that are, after all, just doing their regular animal thing they’ve done for millennia. Scanlan praises the book for its wealth of information — both scientific and historical — its practical strategies for coexisting with bothersome creatures, and its exhortation to readers to see beyond the label “pest” to the complexity of our fellow Earth creatures. Photo by Zeynel Cebeci via Wikimedia Commons