An Exclusive Guest Post from Mary Roach, Author of Fuzz

When you write books for a living, people often ask about the moment of inspiration. For me, it is almost never a moment. It’s rarely a tidy story or a path easily traced. It’s more the trajectory of a pinball, ricocheting chaotically, banking to the top, often dropping off the playfield completely. In the case of Fuzz, it began with a wildlife law enforcement guide entitled “Distinguishing Real vs. Fake Tiger Penis.” (In parts of Asia, tiger penis is sold, illegally and bogusly, as a virility aid.) I can’t recall why or how I came upon this. It just somehow turned up in the sprawling drift net of Mary-needs-a-book-topic.
I thought I might broaden the topic from wildlife crime to crimes against nature. Perhaps I’d include agricultural crime. I began to make calls. I learned about hay bale arson and prize cattle murdered to defraud insurers. I looked into brazen avocado thefts that unfold in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl—some large enough to be classed as a felony (“grand theft avocado”). Things progressed poorly. Ag crime falls to sheriff departments, and the sheriffs were unenchanted. I got passed around like a hot potato, a cliché I would under any other circumstances avoid.
I didn’t drop the idea, not yet. I set up a visit with the author of the penis handbook, Bonnie Yates. Yates worked at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory, where she had assembled the world’s largest animal hair library as well as an impressive reference collection of dried penises. (It’s easy to spot counterfeit tiger, as most of the organs passed off as such are in fact horse or deer. Tigers’ penises are smaller than their claws, an endowment unbefitting a sexual performance booster, particularly one that relies entirely on suggestion.) It was an altogether delightful afternoon, and then Bonnie Yates told me she was set to retire.
Things got worse from there. I told the lab’s director that I envisioned tagging along with investigators in Bangkok street markets and staking out basement sweatshops where counterfeiters carve buck dicks with the telltale barbs of a tiger’s. He informed me that for legal reasons, it would not be possible to do any of this. I could not tag along on any portion of an open investigation. I went home with a heavy heart and an unseemly number of dried genitalia photographs on my phone.
Soon afterward, I had a random thought: What if I turned the topic inside out? What if the animals and plants were the perpetrators rather than the victims? This time the pinball stayed in play. I discovered a heretofore unknown (to me) science: human-wildlife conflict. So began Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law—a two-year journey through the world of murderous leopards, home-invading bears, jaywalking deer, and the researchers and investigators who work to prevent and solve these “crimes.”
Fuzz debuts this month. The drift net has been cast once again. If you see something promising, toss it in. You never know where it might lead.