Roach attends Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training in Reno to learn how officers identify whether a bear or cougar killed a victim.

Trainees examine a manikin modeled on a real attack victim and correctly determine a bear, not a wolf, was responsible.

Roach follows researcher Stewart Breck through Aspen restaurant alleys to observe how unsecured garbage repeatedly draws bears into the city.

A Colorado district wildlife manager investigates a bear break-in with Roach, then traps, tags, and releases the surprisingly deft intruder.

Roach joins a Wildlife Institute of India researcher running elephant awareness camps for villages suffering deadly encounters in North Bengal.

Roach travels to Pauri Garhwal, India, to investigate why the district suffers an unusually high rate of predatory leopard attacks on people.

Roach interviews the Wildlife Institute of India's research director about developing a one-shot contraceptive vaccine to control marauding macaque populations.

Mountain lion researcher Justin Dellinger takes Roach out on an ATV to demonstrate how he counts and tracks California's mountain lion population.

Roach investigates how US military experiments with ricin as a wartime weapon eventually led to its repurposing in rat poison development.

Roach discovers that decades of government-sanctioned crow-bombing and mass bird-killing campaigns failed entirely because of compensatory reproduction in surviving populations.

NASA wildlife biologist Travis DeVault takes Roach to Plum Brook Station to study why deer freeze in front of approaching aircraft.

Bird researcher Tom Seamans demonstrates frightening devices and explains why birds quickly habituate to anything that poses no real consequence.

Dutch florist Paul Deckers arrives at St. Peter's Basilica on Easter morning to find gulls have destroyed his carefully arranged flower displays.

Roach visits the Vatican to question bioethicist Father Casalone about when exterminating a pest species can be ethically justified.

Roach visits a Colorado feedlot owner who peacefully coexists with mice, blackbirds, and foxes, offering her hope for human-animal coexistence.

Mary Roach begins by attending a forensic training where wildlife officers learn to distinguish bear and cougar attack victims, establishing the serious stakes of human-animal conflict. She then follows researchers in Colorado and India as they struggle to manage encounters with bears, elephants, leopards, and macaques, uncovering how human behavior almost always lies at the root of each crisis. Moving across continents and topics, she investigates lesser-known dangers such as ricin-bearing plants, government bird-bombing campaigns, and deer that freeze in front of aircraft. Her research reveals a consistent pattern: lethal responses rarely solve anything, and the institutions tasked with protecting wildlife are often compromised by funding and political pressures. From the gulls wrecking papal flower displays to a Colorado feedlot where coexistence quietly works, Roach closes the book with cautious hope that humanity can choose a different path.

Roach's primary investigations into deadly human-animal conflicts worldwide.

Roach reads about a 1659 Italian court case against caterpillars, sparking her investigation into modern human-animal conflict.

WHART seminar instructors explain that bears attack faces while cougars target the neck, reflecting the difference between omnivores and carnivores.

Instructors reveal that wildlife officers carry tampons to plug bullet wounds in suspected animals and prevent human DNA evidence from being contaminated.

Instructors recount cases where a cougar was wrongly blamed for a human murder and a dingo killing sent an innocent woman to prison.

Roach discovers that Aspen building codes prohibiting easy-open door handles for bears are routinely ignored and essentially never enforced.

Roach learns that translocating conflict bears is expensive, largely ineffective, and frequently creates new dangerous problems in the destination area.

An angry worker at an Indian tea estate speaks out during an awareness camp about elephants raiding and destroying the workers' food gardens.

Researcher Naha shows Roach how abandoned terraced farmland in Pauri Garhwal overgrew into scrubland that draws leopards dangerously close to homes.

Delhi's city veterinarian and chief wildlife warden dispute jurisdiction over macaques while wealthy residents illegally hire langur-wielding monkey wallahs.

Roach learns that blackbirds eat enough insects and weed seeds to actively benefit the same farmers who consider them pests.

The US Navy clubs over 21,000 albatrosses at Midway Atoll to protect aircraft but halts the program when it proves ineffective and demoralizing.

Tom Seamans describes how gulls killed at the World Trade Center recovery site were mounted as effigies to deter other birds from the area.

Vatican gardens director Rafael Tornini acknowledges a serious rat problem on the grounds despite Pope Francis's encyclical declaring no creature superfluous.

Roach learns that New Zealand's stoat traps are redesigned so the striking bar targets the skull directly, ensuring near-instant unconsciousness.

Scientists at the NWRC warn that releasing enough gene-drive mice to affect an island population would first make the rodent problem temporarily worse.

This pool opens with Roach's discovery of a medieval court case against caterpillars and moves into the granular forensic details of the wildlife attack training, including the revealing trick of using tampons to preserve DNA evidence. It captures bureaucratic failures in Aspen, the desperate conditions of Indian tea estate workers, and Delhi officials arguing over who is responsible for the city's rampaging monkeys. The pool documents the spectacular futility of the US Navy's albatross-clubbing campaign at Midway Atoll and the unexpected revelation that crop-pest blackbirds actually benefit the farmers who want them dead. Later chapters expose the Vatican's quiet rat problem and the painstaking redesign of New Zealand's stoat traps to meet humane standards. Together these events fill in the texture of a world where good intentions, cultural bias, and institutional dysfunction consistently get in the way of workable solutions.

The supporting details and discoveries behind each wildlife conflict.

A Yukon conservation officer tells Roach that identifying a bear's behavior—predatory or defensive—is far more useful than identifying its color.

Roach realizes that bears living near human homes tend to survive longer because the aggressive ones are identified as threats and killed first.

Roach learns that elephants knock down the walls of workers' homes to reach homemade alcohol, showing how human food draws the most dangerous encounters.

Roach concludes that in India, some animals enjoy full legal protections while the poorest people have no recourse against elephant raids on their crops.

Indian wildlife law requires a leopard to kill at least three people before officials will authorize hunters to pursue it.

Villagers in Pauri Garhwal direct their anger not at leopards but at a government that fails to provide school buses and accessible hospitals.

Qureshi reveals that people feed monkeys at Hindu temples for religious reasons but simultaneously demand the government remove them from their own homes.

Justin Dellinger argues that the apparent surge in California mountain lion sightings is driven by home security cameras, not any real population growth.

Roach discovers that chewing a castor bean delivers ricin far more effectively than swallowing it whole, making a common garden plant unexpectedly dangerous.

Experts reveal that killing 60 percent of coyotes every single year would be required just to have any meaningful impact on their population.

Researchers determine that deer cannot estimate the speed of fast-moving vehicles because no natural predator in their evolutionary history moves that quickly.

Everglades rangers remove vulture effigies from a parking area because visitors are too disturbed by the sight of dead birds hanging near their cars.

Green lasers successfully deter gulls throughout the Vatican's Easter Mass, and Paul Deckers's flower arrangements survive the entire event undamaged.

Bruce Warburton argues that New Zealand's war on invasive predators is fatally undermined by the double standard of allowing housecats to roam freely.

Jane Goodall speaks out against gene drive technology at a scientific meeting, warning the field is moving too fast and without proper guidelines.

This pool traces the moments when the underlying logic of human-animal conflict suddenly snaps into focus for Roach and her readers. From the revelation that reading a bear's behavior matters more than its color to the discovery that deer brains simply cannot process the speed of a car, each event exposes how human assumptions rather than animal aggression drive most crises. Roach uncovers how religious devotion, crumbling infrastructure, and jurisdictional cowardice allow conflicts to worsen even when obvious solutions exist. The philosophical tension peaks when New Zealand's admirable invasive-species campaign is revealed to exempt the beloved housecat, exposing the irrational double standards at the heart of what humans choose to protect or to kill. The pool closes with Jane Goodall's warning against gene drives at a scientific conference, leaving the question open of whether humanity's most powerful new tool represents wisdom or simply another form of overreach.