Something You Should Know - Strange Ways Men and Women Differ & Why We Label Some Animals Pests - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

Creating strong passwords is a modern headache. Simple ones are easy to hack. Complex ones are hard to remember. And using the same password everywhere is just asking for trouble. This episode begins with a smarter, practical strategy for creating passwords that are both secure and memorable. Source: Sid Kirchheimer, author of Scam-Proof Your Life (https://amzn.to/3SeWhA5) Men and women differ in ways that go far beyond the obvious — and some of the most fascinating differences rarely get discussed. From how men and women hear sound differently, to why women tend to live longer, to how hormones influence behavior in surprisingly specific ways, these differences are deeply rooted in biology and evolution. Cat Bohannon joins me to explain what science really shows. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (https://amzn.to/3SgBUlO). Rats, insects, bees, deer, spiders — the world is full of creatures we label as “pests.” But what actually makes an animal a pest? And why do humans respond to some species with fear, anger, or extermination, while others get sympathy or protection? Bethany Brookshire explains how humans often create pests through our own behavior, and what our reactions reveal about us. She’s an award-winning science writer and author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://amzn.to/3vzlpZt) And finally, most drivers never adjust their car’s headrest — or even know how it should be positioned. In a crash, that small oversight can make a big difference. We wrap up with how to set your headrest properly to reduce the risk of whiplash and neck injury. https://www.adlergiersch.com/provider-blog/how-to-properly-adjust-your-headrest-to-prevent-whiplash/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on something you should know, how to come up with a secure password that you will remember. Then, fascinating differences between men and women, like how we hear differently, why women live longer, and why we men are hairier. Technically, you're not hairier in terms of follicles per centimeter. It's actually what type of hair those follicles are building, but technically the hairiest people are blondes. Actually, blondes are producing the most follicles. Anywho, fun fact, take that to your dinner party.

Also, why you should probably adjust the headrests in your car. And pests. They're everywhere. But what makes a pest a pest? So it's not universal for specific pests. Not everyone views rats as being uniformly disgusting. Not everyone views snakes with fear. So really, the concept of a pest and of something that's always going to bother us

depends on whether or not we're going to let ourselves be bothered. All this today on something you should know. The regency era. you might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or is the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era,

the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal. Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts. and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Well, hello.

You've come to the right place if you're hoping to hear another all-new episode of something you should know. We start today with the subject of passwords. I don't know anybody that likes passwords. They are the definition of a necessary evil. You have to have them, but nobody likes dealing with them. And the fact that nobody likes dealing with them is probably why some of the most common passwords are things like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ABC, 123, or the word password.

They're still on the list of most commonly used and easy-to-crack passwords. Another one that I didn't realize, people sometimes use these three words, let me in as their password. They make it one word, let me in, and that too is on the list of, of commonly used and easy-to-hack passwords. And adding your name or your birth year to any of those really lame passwords doesn't help because hackers know how to get past those too.

The best and most secure passwords are still a pain in the neck. They're random scrambled characters that are super hard to crack, but also impossible to remember. So your best bet to secure a password that you will remember is to combine two parts of unrelated words. For example, January and elephant could be Januphant. You throw in a couple of uppercase letters and a few numbers, and you're pretty good to go. Another trick is to combine foreign and English words to create a unique word.

That's at least eight characters in length and that you won't forget. And that is something you should know. As you know, men and women are different. They are different in some obvious ways and also in some not so obvious ways and some very interesting ways. Here to explain some of those differences is Kat Bohanan. Kat is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. And she's author of a book called Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Hi, Kat.

Hi, thanks for having me. So since we have to start somewhere, pick what you think is one. of the most interesting differences between men and women. And well, and let's start there. Maybe the first and most important thing, given that we all have bodies which are, you know, mortal, is that there is this really known longevity boost if you are a biologically female person. And that's true across mammals. Like if you're female, you live longer. We used to think it was about behavior, you know, kind of like dumb boys doing dumb boy stuff, whether it's a tiger or human being, right? And that's that risky behavior, in other words. But actually, it turns out to be true,

even in a lot of lab mammals, there's something costly. There's something weirdly dangerous about not being female that we haven't really unlocked yet. And I think that's really the future of gerontology. Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's really interesting. Do you think it's that by being female, you live longer? Or is it by being male, you live shorter? Or is that just saying the same thing in a different way. Actually, I think that's a really, really smart way of putting it because it's kind of both and they're not exactly the same thing. So you would think it's about all that stuff you can see when you look at a body that looks different between us. But actually, the really deep differences between male and female bodies go all the way down to like cellular behavior,

right? There's something about, for example, how male typical neurons, you know, neurons that have a Y chromosome, respond to the signal to commit Harry Carey, the signal to die, apoptosis, which is to say, if you get hit in the head with a tire iron, what's the tissue in your head going to do? Well, it turns out if you have a Y chromosome, you're more likely to have a bigger inflammatory response. You're more likely to have bigger long-term damage. And you see that in the ER, actually. You see that males with traumatic head injuries have worse. prognoses. And it's not necessarily because of how they got the injury or the features of that injury, but how the tissue in that head is responding to it. And that seems to be true with a lot of

like stroke response and things like that, which is to say there's something about being female that makes you better at, well, not dying. And a lot of that has to do with inflammatory response. Unfortunately, Mike, you're not as good at not dying as I may be just because of our different sex. One of the things that they're testing in the lab right now is whether or not in the ER, we should be giving male patients a kind of local bolus of, well, estradile, which is a kind of estrogen, to help buffer that response to make you live longer, which is to say, are there temporary ways to make you maybe more female so that we could make you live longer? And that's a really interesting new direction in sex differences, not just like, oh, what are they? But how can we

use that knowledge to make us live healthier lives. That is so interesting because I think people have the belief. I've always believed that women live longer than men because of things like, you know, we're under more stress or we don't handle it as well or it's relationship related, but that we just have it tougher somehow. But it's, what you're saying is, well, that may be true, but that's not necessarily the cause. Exactly. I think it's useful to separate out what we think our lives are like, which is made of this kind of very modern, very contemporary soup of our culture, right? How we understand ourselves in the world is built at least in part in how we grow up and how we take ideas on, you know. But then there's stuff that just our tissue is doing, right? Then there's just stuff like for whatever reason, especially after puberty, male typical cardiovascular systems show more wear and tear, you know? And I don't think it's that your life is necessarily more stressful at 17, just socially, necessarily than a girl.

Having been a teenage girl, I can tell you that's some stressful stuff. That's, uh, you know, it ain't easy, let's say, being a teenager of any sex, yeah. But there's something about male typical puberty that's really kind of costly on the male heart. And you can see that over that male's lifespan, and that really shows up in old age. So I think a lot of cutting edge research into aging and gerontology is looking at, oh, are these sex differences setting people on a path? Are there ways of mitigating that over time that could really help us, you know, get older with less pain and suffering, which I think is a good goal. So even though women may live longer, and statistically they do, but isn't it true that women

are more likely to get Alzheimer's disease when they get older? Yeah, so there's this paradox. This is called the longevity frailty paratox. So there's this medical term frail. You know, you've probably heard it, which just means you have more health complaints. It doesn't necessarily mean brittle bones, although sometimes with osteoporosis, but, you know. And so after menopause, female patients tend to be more frail. We have more health complaints.

And yet somehow we're still out surviving you guys. That's where the longevity boost is. Every year, more of us keep living and more of you, unfortunately, not so much, yeah? So that's one of the things that people are trying to figure out, okay, we're more frail, but we keep surviving. So what's that frailty made of? So one of the really cutting-edge things around Alzheimer's and female patients is looking at menopause itself because for certain kinds of dementias, women who are on hormone therapy,

usually because of night sweats or some other reasons during that three-year transition. Remember, menopause doesn't last forever, right? So it's actually this window right around age 50. So for patients who are on estradile, who are on hormone supportive therapy during that window, they have some protection against dementia later on. They also seem to have some protection against osteoporosis because it turns out most of the bone thinning happens right around there, which is to say maybe the story of the frailty isn't necessarily about living longer. Maybe some of those frailties, which may indeed include Alzheimer's vulnerabilities, have to do with the worst. wackiness that goes down in the body in that three-year window when our hormones are all over the place, as opposed to that longer stretch afterwards.

So is there something about, I mean, obviously there's differences between male and female. That's why we take biology and health class in high school to explain all that. But there are differences in men and women that, for example, men tend to be taller, men tend to be hairier, men tend to, you know, or women tend to be short. order and have less hair. So what about those kinds of differences? And do they mean anything? So for me, I find it curious and fun that so many people with why chromosomes tend to have more body hair, although technically you're not hairier in terms of follicles per centimeter. You're actually not, it's actually what type of hair those follicles are building.

Female bodies tend to build more of our vellis, that sort of baby fine, think of it as peach fuzz, you know what I mean? Whereas a lot of you guys are using more of your follicles to push out those longer hairs. But technically the hairiest people are blondes per centimeter of skin. Actually, blondes are producing the most follicles. Anywho, fun fact, take that to your dinner party. I think one of the things that's really interesting about something we assume about our bodies that doesn't turn out to be true is that males are so much taller. Because actually when you look at other primates, our males are really very similarly sized to our females. Like, even compared to a chimp, so we're super crazy related to a chimp, like biologically, right? Like 99% you've probably

heard that stat. But their males are much bigger and much heavier than the females compared to human beings. Actually, the big story of human beings is a move over that long hominin evolutionary line towards sameness, towards similarity. And the big story there is that they're might be a reduction in male-male-male competition. Like, you guys got nicer to each other, and you competed with each other a little bit less for mates than other primates might have done. That's usually the story most anthropologists tell when they look at our evolution. We're talking about some interesting and unusual differences between men and women that you

may not know. My guest is Kat Bohanan. She's author of a book called Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Kradarokian Empire, which occupies and dominates most of the galaxies inhabited planets. The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed, leaving countless corpses in their wake. Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways,

all hoping to find some small bit of peace amidst a universe thick with violence and a For decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living. But a friend from the past won't let them move on. And neither will their bitterest enemy. The Stonewolves is Season 11 of the Galactic Football League Science Fiction series by author Scott Sigler. Enjoy it as a standalone story or listen to the entire GFL series beginning with season one, The Rookie. Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts.

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weekly. So Kat, another one of the interesting differences you talk about between men and women is how we hear, how we hear things, how we hear voices. So one of the interesting things that I learned doing the book is that the average male ear is actually losing its ability to hear higher pitches, starting at about age 25. Now, it's not so much that you need a hearing age at 30. Not like that. It's subtle, right? It's cutting off the high end. But slowly but surely, there's there's this predictable slope where you're hearing less and less of that high end of hearing, whereas females are retaining it for longer, right? But because, of course, our pitches of voice, the timbre of our voice is made of the

whole range of our pitches, right? But the ultra-high end of a female voice tends to be up in the higher range of our hearing, which is to say that male listeners are hearing less and less of the full timbre of my voice the older they get. And by the time you reach middle age, female voices might well sound a little bit tinny, thinner, a little bit harder to hear, actually. And it's actually very, very hard to make male listeners understand that because female listeners are keeping those higher ranges of their hearing for longer and longer. What? That was a joke.

See? But all these things often have a reason. You know, if you look back evolutionarily speaking, do we know why we have this difference in hearing? The short answer is no. The longer answer might be interesting. So the short answer is no. There are two threads to the longer answer.

One is that the reason that any ear loses some of its higher pitches is that you're getting these fine breaks in the hair cells and the cochlea, which is to say it's a matter of damage and cellular repair. as with anything in the body, the wear and tear story, right? And again, if female bodies are generally better at not dying, well, there might be a repair story in there. It might just be that, again, that female body is resisting aging just slightly in a way that's kind of invisible, maybe even in the inner ear, right? That maybe for some reason, this is just an aging story that you just can't see until you get older and you go, huh? What'd you say then?

Right? The other story might have to do with babies. The female ear does seem to be slightly more tuned to higher pitches, ones that correspond to baby cries. That doesn't mean it's our destiny to make babies and hear them and be annoyed by them. I have two. I love them, but, you know. But rather that just there is an evolutionarily rewarding thing about being able to hear you kid. and female ears are slightly better at it.

And maybe if we retain that hearing, that could have had a biological advantage over time. Hard to say. Honestly, I think both biological stories carry some weight. So I wanted to ask you something, and I don't actually know if you talk about this, but I bet you do. And that is, you know, having been a father, I was aware or became aware of how there are a lot more cesarean births than there used to be. And I've heard things about, well, it's the head and the hips and it's too big. And then I've also heard, well, but it's actually more convenient to schedule a birth than to wait around. So what's the deal with that?

What's the deal with C-sections real quick? Let's say that it's complex. I think it is true that some women, especially women in poorer areas, there is a push towards. C-sections that now there's a push back against it. Like in other words, there might have been a bit of a rush towards doing a C-section out of fear of complications that might not have been as necessary. So that's a complex kind of contemporary thing going on. However, C-sections save lives. I have many friends who would not be alive without having had a C-section. Usually those are emergency C-sections. Now, in terms of the width of the pelvis and things getting stuck and what have you, that's

complicated. But I would also say that human birth is pretty terrible compared to other primates, except for a squirrel monkey. Actually, the majority of primates have it way better than we do. So we shouldn't be so surprised that we would be able to then save lives with medical intervention for human birth, right? Like, let me give it to you in real terms, though, for people who don't. think about this stuff. A first time human mom who's giving birth is going to be in labor for like a dozen

hours, like 12 to 14 hours. And that's kind of before she even starts pushing the giant head of baby out. We won't get into the details. Again, a G-rated podcast, but let's just say it doesn't feel good. Okay. Now, a first time chip mom, the average is 30 to 40 minutes. That's top to bottom. That's you go into labor and you give birth and you knuckle walk away. You know, like that's it. So when I think about the whole C-section debate, I am always balancing, can we save people's lives and is there a way to do it that is as safe as possible? And I think C-section technology has really improved massively so, even in the last few decades,

but certainly over the last half century. And we save a lot of lives doing that. Wow. Well, if you save lives, it seems like why would you push back against that? What would be, I mean, yeah, it's not natural birth, but my God. Well, there's that word natural. There's that tricky thing there, Mike, because it is natural in a human body to intervene on birth, right? That 3.2 million years ago, Lucy, the presumably very furry, Australopithecine, who's one of our ancestors,

she very likely had a midwife. She likewise had a small pelvic opening and a proportionally larger baby. The general assumption, the big story going down there, is that we've actually assisted one another giving birth for a very, very long time in our ancestral line. That what is most natural for us, in other words, is to help one another survive using medical knowledge, using tech as best as we can. Like, that's a big part of the human evolutionary story. So, actually, it is perfectly natural to use gynecological tech to help one another survive the objectively bad process of how we make babies. But the reason there's pushback.

So the short answer, though, the reason there's pushback against C-sections is that there's a fear that, well, are we having so many C-sections because it is financially more rewarding for the hospital? Sometimes that may be true. Sometimes not. It's hard to say. There's a huge debate around that. It's still not a minor surgery.

You are cutting into an abdomen. It's still true that you can have complications and problems from a C-section. Your physical recovery from a C-section may well be very long. None of this is great. Let's put it that way. None of this is great. And it's absolutely right to not assume that just because you're having a C-section, everything's okay. But I'm still down with people surviving.

So if it's a matter of someone surviving and having less, suffering over their lifetime because of a C-section versus not. And if that person wants that baby to survive, let's assume yes. And then that person gets to become a person and that's the central goal here. That also seems pretty good to me, right? So I think it's okay and it makes sense that there's pushback. But it is weird to me that we tell ourselves this story that somehow it's unnatural. That somehow it's like a thing that we would only do now and we should only do what we used to do. A lot of people used to die given birth. I'm down with not going back to that. Is there any other difference or unique thing about women like we talked about that they live

longer or that their hearing is different? Any other differences like that that you can talk about that are kind of interesting? One of the things that I find really interesting are the assumptions that we make about things like testosterone, which is to say the androgens and the estrogens, and how they do or do not produce certain kinds of behavior. So, for example, we assume that testosterone makes people who are male be really aggressive, right? And where does that come from? Well, that comes from stereotypes about how you're supposed to behave, Mike, right?

That you're really competitive and aggressive and, I don't know, roar, whatever. right? And that we're supposed to be all diminutive and sweet and whatever. And that's somehow coming from testosterone versus estrogen. But actually, all of these sex hormones are present in both bodies, no matter what sex you've got. And actually, testosterone doesn't seem to necessarily make you violent or physically aggressive. So for example, there's a lot of data out there from prisons, actually, that people who, males who have committed violent crimes in American prisons tend to have higher serum rates of testosterone. So that's part of the story we built around, oh, testosterone makes you violent. But actually, it turns out that males who are really affiliative, but very

dominant in their social group, but got there by being friendly with everyone, also have higher levels of testosterone. So the bigger story about testosterone seems to be that it may, makes you compete for social status. And depending what's most rewarding in your given social environment for social status, that'll produce that kind of behavior. It's also true that your testosterone varies according to what's going on. Like people who are competing in sports, in the most competitive phases of sports, your serum testosterone peaks. And then when you're done playing, it goes back down again. So is that your innate competitiveness or isn't that response to your competitiveness. Likewise with the libido thing. Actually, females likewise have more

libido because of their testosterone. And if their testosterone drops, I'm including myself here, libido tends to go down. One of the things you may not know about female birth control, the pill. When we take the pill, our testosterone levels tend to drop, actually. And that may be more of why our libido goes down when we're on the pill than necessary. the rise in our estrogen, right? So you have to think about the brain constantly doing these complex things with all of these really, really ancient neurotransmitters and hormones and what have you. And there's very rarely a smoking gun for why you are the way you are. Well, this has been really eye-opening because, you know, I like to think I know about the differences between men and

women, but I learned a lot today. I never knew before. I've been speaking with Kat Bohannon. She is a researcher and author. The name of her book is Eve, How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for coming on today, Kat. Okay, great. Thanks for your time today, Mike.

Part of living on planet Earth is we have to deal with pests. The world is full of them. Mosquitoes, rats, bats, coyotes, all kinds of creatures we have labeled pests for one reason or another, but says who? After all, the white-tailed deer kills 400 people a year. Does that make it a pest? Is that squirrel in your garden a pest?

Who's to say? Here to discuss why some creatures are pests and others aren't is Bethany Brookshire. Bethany is an award-winning science writer. She is a contributor to Science News magazine. And she is author of a book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. Hi, Bethany. Welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

This is so interesting because I had never really thought about this before until I saw your book. That, you know, really what determines whether a creature is labeled a pest or not seems to be their PR. Like if they have bad PR, then they're a pest, like rats and. I mean, but they're just living their life and doing what they do to try to survive. I would say that's definitely something that I found. Yeah, the idea of what makes something a pest is about us. It's about our desires and our beliefs about the environments that we live in and what those environments should contain.

And how would you define a pest? I mean, what's your working definition? I really like the definition that Philip Nihis, who's a professor at, I believe, Colby College, put in a review in 2016. He actually constructed this graph. It's like a three-dimensional graph. And basically, it's measures how frequently we encounter an animal, how severe the encounter is, and how positive or negative it is. So a very rare, very positive, very impactful encounter. So for example, if I were able to go to Australia and snuggle a wombat, which is something I've always wanted to do, that would be a very non-pest encounter, right? On the other end, you have your very rare, very negative, very impactful encounter, which is like a direct personal encounter with a grizzly bear. Very rare, very direct, really a problem.

You probably won't survive. Right. Pests are where our encounters are very common, slightly negative, and not super impactful. Right. I think of pests as not coming for us directly. They're coming for our stuff. Some of our stuff is like our trash or they're coming for our food stores or they're coming for our crops or our pets. right? They aren't attacking us. They are attacking things that we value that are not us directly. And that makes those encounters less severe, but also we encounter them very, very commonly. Right. So it's common. It's slightly negative and it's like low to medium impact. So truly a pest is in the mind of the beholder because like for example, you could you could have like rats in your house that you're trying to

get rid of. But your kid could also have a pet rat that it got at the store. They're all rats, but the one in your kid's bedroom isn't a pest. So it's not universal for specific pests. Not everyone views rats as being uniformly disgusting, for example. Not everyone views snakes with fear. Not everyone views mice as being bad or pigeons as being gross. Because of that differentiation, there are different ways to look at the world. So, for example, I was able to learn a lot and study with members of indigenous groups from various places around the world. And in many of their cases, they do not have a word for pest in their language. It doesn't exist. And that's because to them, and I'm not saying, like, I know their beliefs. I don't speak on their behalf. But what I understand,

is that because they see their relationship to the environments they live in differently, they do not perceive other animals in those environments as being a problem. We as kind of the global north, the West, our dominant culture views two areas. There are areas where humans are, and then there is wilderness areas where humans are not. And that means that where humans are, animals that live in the wilderness should not be. And where wilderness is, humans should not be. And that allows you to say, well, those other things should not be there, then they are pests. They are bad and they should leave.

Right. In many indigenous societies, they don't make that distinction. Right. They live in the environment with everything else. And in that case, everything else does have a right to be there. So really, the concept of a pest and of something that's always going to bother us depends on whether or not we're going to let ourselves be bothered. And that depends a lot on how we view the environment around us. Well, it's interesting, you know, when you say the word pest, it doesn't sound so serious, right?

You know, the ants on your picnic blanket ruining your picnic, you know, that's a pest. But we also have pests that do harm. I mean, you know, rats bite people, carry disease. bees sting people sometimes to death, mosquito spread, lots of disease. Those are pests that are serious pests. And we can't just throw our hands up and go, well, we don't want to be, we don't want to be mean and kill them all. But they're a problem. Very true.

But I think there's also different ways to go after this problem. And rats in particular are a great example. We see rats as disgusting. We see rats as being associated with filth, as being associated with disease, right? And it's interesting because the reason we associate those animals with those places is because rats thrive in areas where human social contracts have failed. They thrive in areas where we make families and children live in public housing projects that are not maintained. They thrive in places where garbage is not picked up. They thrive in places where good architecture is not maintained.

We encounter these pests and we encounter them in very close quarters when we aren't taking care of each other. rats cause real problems for people because people cause problems for each other. And I think that's true for a large variety of animals that we could consider pests. But if a beehive shows up outside my door and my kids are out there playing, it's not because I wasn't taking care of things. That's what bees do and I don't want them there. Well, I would argue that bees are never pests personally. And partially because some of my.

reporting. I showed how farmers in Kenya, for example, are using beehives to keep elephants away from their fields. Bees are important pollinators. They're really great for that. They are sometimes important predators, which is really nice. This is a wide definition of bees, obviously. But yes, I mean, I would say you don't necessarily want these animals living in close quarters with you. But what I would also say is that doesn't mean you need to hate them, right? That doesn't mean that we need to respond to every bee or spider or rat by saying kill it with fire. It means we need to think about it. Why is that bee hive there? Or yellow jackets are the animal with which I'm a little more familiar. They tend to thrive in abandoned areas. So, for example,

if you have abandoned a car in your lawn, you will sometimes get a hive of yellow jackets up in there, right? or, you know, dead trees. They are cavity dwellers. They sometimes often dig into the ground. I've had a bunch of yellow jacket nests in my property. And we need to, when we see these animals in these places, we need to understand why they're there, what they're doing and what they want, right? Otherwise, our first response is going to be, okay, we're going to kill it with fire.

Okay, we're going to spray it with poison. We're going to do all of these things. And then when they come back, we're going to get even matter. It doesn't help us long term understand why animals end up where they do. And that's one of the other things that I really loved about learning from indigenous peoples was that they relied so heavily on traditional ecological knowledge, right? A deep understanding of their environments derived from literally thousands of years of observation. And their response when seeing an animal where they don't necessarily want it is not kill it with fire.

They do kill it, right? I talked with a man who was an elder of the Diné, the Navajo. And he said, yeah, if I have a mouse in my house, I'm getting out the snaptrops, 100% I'm killing it. He was like, but I'm also wondering what message that mouse is sending me, right? Or what message that hive of bees is sending you? Do you have a dead tree right there? Do you have a cavity somewhere that needs to be covered over? Why is it there and what does it want? That gives you a much more long-term solution than just, you know, trapping and poisoning your way out of the problem. So if a mosquito lands on your arm, do you smack it and kill it?

Yes. Why? Well, so I firmly believe that mosquitoes are not pests. They are, predators of humans. They eat us. They are not attacking our stuff. They are not attacking things that we value. They are eating us.

And so I would say they are our most important predator as opposed to a pest. I hadn't really thought about this before, but you talk about the white-tailed deer, the common deer as a pest because of what it does to people. Yeah, millions of people hit white-tailed deer. tail deer every year with their cars. The thing I love about pests and also the thing I hate about them is they're so complicated. Part of the reason there are so many deer hits is because there are so many deer. Are there historically high numbers of deer? Maybe sort of kind of. There are historically high concentrations of deer in specific areas. And that is again because of us when colonel

European first arrived to North America. We, of course, had a massive taste for venison, because, like, of course you do. And we killed most of the deer on the East Coast. And then we were like, oh no, there are no deer left to hunt. This is terrible. There were several efforts to reintroduce deer. But more importantly, in the 20th century, a lot of Eastern agriculture was abandoned and a lot more suburbs were built. And what that did was it created a lot of secondary growth forest and a lot of edge habitat. And both of those things are fantastic for deer. Deer love that stuff. You get a lot of like nice tender shoots and forbs and delicious things that deer like to eat. And so it's because of our way of life that this population of deer has skyrocketed so much. In particular, in suburbs, deer populations have skyrocketed because we, We also aren't hunting them in the suburbs for safety reasons.

So that could tell us a lot about the environment that we've created that have allowed these deer to thrive. And then we put roads in there, roads where we want people to drive very fast to get from point A to point B. It's an interesting fact, and it's for the people who encounter these deer often a very tragic fact. but it also reveals so much about the environments we create and how those environments encourage particular species, often completely without our knowledge. And then we're like, oh my goodness, all of these deer are here. How could this possibly have happened? Well, given that we share this environment with other creatures and some of those creatures we consider pests,

we have to set up some sort of standard operating procedure, some kind of rules. but you can't get those other creatures to agree to the rules because they can't. And so what do we do? It's interesting. You said that we have to set up these rules, right? What I find important is that right now we set up a lot of rules that are designed for humans. They are designed for human environments. They are designed for interacting with other humans, right?

we don't set up rules for interacting with animals, in part because we don't understand them. We do, of course, set up some rules. There are laws around like the hunting and trapping of animals, etc. But what I'm talking about is something that I learned from indigenous peoples. One of the people who I spoke to about this, and what he told me was Neil Patterson, that's him. And what he told me was that invasive species and pests are animals for which we do not have a treaty. And the idea is that for many indigenous peoples, there are treaties that they have with animals and with things, with water and rocks and trees in their environments. These are not written treaties.

They did not go up to a tree and say, hey, would you sign this treaty? That's not what they mean. what they mean is they have understandings, deep understandings about how the animals and plants and things in their environment behave. And because of that, they adjust their behavior to coexist with those animals, right? We could do that. We could learn about the animals in our environments. We could understand what deer like. We could understand where deer like to go. We could adjust our behavior and our environments accordingly with understanding. Right now, we approach them with anger. We approach them with ignorance. And a lot of times that means that it

backfires both on us and on the animals. Well, not always. I think there is some of this understanding going on now. Where I live in my neighborhood, in California, we have in any 24, 48 hours, period, I see deer, bobcats, bears, coyotes, rabbits. And everybody in this area knows, and we see a lot of deer that live around here, the slow down, nobody hits deer, they're fine. We had a bear in our pool. The bear sometimes gets into people's trash, but nobody's calling animal control and we just let them be and they leave us alone. There have been no encounters that I know of. It's just we have that understanding. Yeah, I love that. Another person who I spoke to, his name is Douglas Nislaus. He's the chief counselor of the

Kidisou, Haye, which is in the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada. And obviously, as you can tell, by the name Great Bear Rainforest, it has a lot of bear in it, black bear specifically. And he told me about a time when his village was having a lot of trouble with these bears. They were coming into town. They were getting in the trash. They were, you know, it was getting to be really dangerous. They were really interacting with humans. And they ended up calling the Canadian government and saying, help with the bears.

And the Canadian government came in and shot the bears. And the tribe was like, what? We didn't want you to shoot the bears. And the government said, well, that's our mandate. If you call us, we have to shoot the bears. like that's that's in our laws and douglas said okay that's great you're no longer welcome thank you and the villagers got together and they said okay based on our understanding of these bears what do we know about them how do we coexist and they moved to the site of their salmon cannery they got rid of

every single fruit tree in the village and they invested in piles of bear resistant trash cans and they have not had a bear problem since because they decided to live with these animals and not against them. And I think that's beautiful. That sounds like something that your neighborhood is doing too. And, you know, that's something that I think we could do if we really wanted to. But it starts with having the assumption, the belief that we don't think of them as pests. They're just like neighbors. We don't think of them as horrible. like I might think of a rat in my kitchen is horrible. Yeah.

We just think of them as neighbors, as fellow inhabitants of the environment in which we live. One thing that I know is a problem, and I hear it from other people in other places, but I see it here, is that people put food out for the bear and the deer, and that just brings them in. A lot of times we end up in conflict,

with bears, deer, etc. rats, because we are providing them food, either accidentally or on purpose. One of the things I learned in my reporting on white-tailed deer and bear in particular is how many people feed these animals on purpose? And I would just like to say, please don't do that. That is actually going to promote conflict and it's not actually acting out of the animal's best interests. We do that because we want it. We want that Disney princess moment, right, of the deer eating out of our hand or something. And real coexistence with wildlife means that's probably a bad idea. I think when I, and I think a lot of people think that, you know, pests are something to get rid of. That's part of the definition of a pest is you want to get rid of it. But as you've pointed out, that's really probably not the best long-term solution that we need to find a way to coexist with creatures who we consider pests in a way that they don't bother us and we don't bother them. And there are ways to do it.

Bethany Brookshire has been my guest. She's an award-winning science writer, contributor to Science News Magazine, and she's author of a book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. and there's a link to her podcast and to that book in the show notes. Thanks for explaining this, Bethany. Yeah, no worries. Thank you so much. These are really good questions. When you first get in your car, you probably make some adjustments. You adjust the mirror, you adjust the seat, maybe you adjust the heater AC. But what you probably don't adjust is the headrest.

But where that's positioned can make a huge size. difference if you're in an accident. Most people just leave the headrest in the furthest down position, which actually puts your neck at risk. The best way to position the headrest in your car is, so ideally the top of the headrest should be as high as the top of your head, but certainly no lower than the top of your ears. And when seated normally, your head should be no more than four inches from the headrest. That way, if your head is thrown back, in a collision, it doesn't have far to go to meet with the headrest. And that is something you should know.

One great way for you to support this podcast is leave a rating and review on Spotify or Apple or whatever platform you listen on. I'm Mike Her Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.