Animal Vegetable Criminal by Mary Roach

Time can sneak by you when you're not paying attention: I think of Mary Roach as an interesting writer of vaguely science-based non-fiction books that I enjoy reading, but it turns out I read two books of hers - Bonk and Stiff - about fifteen years ago, and nothing since.

Well, until right now, since I just finished Animal Vegetable Criminal, her book from 2021. But she had four other books in between, which I vaguely knew existed and even put on my "keep an eye out for" lists, but clearly did not put enough effort into finding.

This one is framed as an investigation into the intersection of the natural and legal worlds, which is slightly misleading. It does start out in that territory, with chapters about forensics when animals kill humans, keeping large mammals (e.g., bears) away from unpleasant encounters with humans, and so on (elephants, leopards). But it fairly quickly moves out of the legal world, since there isn't that much recent case law with animal and vegetable defendants, and Roach seems to be more interested in how modern human society deals with the ways that it encroaches on natural habitats and how the natural world reacts.

So there are chapters, later in the book, about controlling invasive species in New Zealand, keeping birds from befouling various events in the Vatican, about the dangers of falling trees (cut by humans or felled by natural forces), and about managing animal populations in general.

I was vaguely disappointed in that bait-and-switch, since there are legal issues - the personhood of trees and rivers and baboons, to mention just one area - that Roach could have investigated but didn't. But I often find myself wishing books were different than they are, and it's not a useful wish.

Animal Vegetable Criminal somewhat disguises it, but it's organized around what seems to be four or five research trips Roach took in (I think) 2018-2019, starting with a swing through the Western US (for the law-enforcement material that leads off the book) and then what I think were later trips to the Vatican, several locations in India, New Zealand, and maybe another trip or two within the US. In each location, she talks to experts, gets good quotes and insights, and incorporates them into engaging chapters on generally discrete topics, though each chapter tends to lead into the next one, either geographically or thematically.

So this is not exactly a book about a single discrete thing, but also not really a book of separate essays on loosely related topics. It's somewhere in the middle, like a line of beads on a string, that starts one place (what happens when "animals break the law") and travels through other places where human rules and society conflict with the natural world. Roach is a lively, amusing writer, with a generally positive attitude, making it a fun read, even when she's writing about often-intractable problems (invasive species, for example). So I recommend it, with the mild caveat that there's less legal stuff than some readers (especially those as embedded in the legal world as I am these days) might want.