Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2022

The Current Transcript for May 23, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Just before the pope comes out to, say, Easter mass. There's a huge and very elaborate floral display and a couple of years ago, for no apparent reason, this group of gulls came in and just knocked things over and pulled things around roses were strewn everywhere.

MATT GALLOWAY: Animals behaving badly. The science writer Mary Roach is fascinated with human animal encounters gone wrong. In her latest book, Fuzz, she tells tales of dumpster diving bears and humans who attract them deadly elephants in India and a CSI for animals in British Columbia. In an hour, we revisit our conversation with Mary Roach. Also this morning.

SOUNDCLIP

Something inexplicable happens when a man picks up a tool to do home repairs. Some forces yet undescribed by science, but nevertheless well known to women.

MG: It is a holiday Monday and as is tradition at CBC Radio, we bring you an episode of the Vinyl Cafe with the late, great Stuart McLean. This morning, Dave tries to be an electrician. It doesn't go well. That's in 30 minutes. But first, sniffles, sneezes and more. Sound familiar? Yes, indeed. Allergy season is back and it's not getting any better. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Back To Top »

Allergy season is getting longer and experts say climate change is to blame

Guests: Cecilia Sierra |Heredia, Anne Ellis

MG: There is a specific sort of misery known only to these seasonal allergy sufferers. It is the misery of congestion that lasts from April through October. Sleepless nights, constant sneezing, a feeling that six year old Minnie, who lives in Fonthill, Ontario, is getting to know well.

SOUNDCLIP

Speaker 1: My eyes get a little wet. Only if I don't take my medicine before I go outside and get close to flowers. And I just [unintelligible] it feel kinda kind of itchy in my nose and I have the slivers from my allergies also.

MG: Gayle Kurtzman of Toronto only developed allergies as an adult, but they've been getting worse.

SOUNDCLIP

My allergies have become more intense over the years to the point where now I need to take prescription antihistamines, that the over-the-counter stuff does not work anymore. So imagine waking up in the morning and you can't see your eyes are so swollen and puffy, then you know you're having a bad day, chronic sneezing and itchy and sore throats.

MG: Gayle's, right. It does seem to be getting worse for a lot of people. Studies have found that allergy season is getting both longer and more intense and experts blame climate change. Cecilia Sierra Heredia is a lecturer at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and she studies the link between seasonal allergies and climate change. She's in Vancouver. Cecilia, good morning.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Hi, good morning. Thank you for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. How is allergy season changing? And I say this is somebody who I don't think I suffer from seasonal allergies, but I certainly know a lot of people who do for sure.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Well, unfortunately, it's changing in the sense that there are more days in the in the season. So for people who think that their allergies have been going on forever, yes, they're right. And we have more pollen grains in the air. So it's different depending on the cities. It's a very local thing. But this increases have been seen worldwide for sure.

MG: Tell me more about that. I mean, as you said, there's more pollen in the air. What does that mean?

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: So the measures worldwide, and particularly in Canada, we have very reliable data, have shown that as increases in greenhouse gases concentration carry on with an increase in temperatures and an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the plants respond by having longer flowering seasons. And then, of course, that means more pollen in the air.

MG: How have you seen that? The longer flowering seasons? I mean, it does feel people will say anecdotally that the seasons feel different. But how have you noticed that?

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Well, there have been some very interesting experiments. For example, some studies in the Netherlands. There's one in particular quite out of the box thinking that measured their bike tours, pretty much like the two of the plants. And you know how there are always some stops that are traditional. So the camera crews were settled in the same locations year after year, and those are some of the recordings. Wearing black and white, they could see and quantify how many trees were already green or flowering. And so throughout the decades, there was a very clear increase in the number of trees that were flowering on a specific given that.

MG: So in the same location, they would see those trees flowering earlier and earlier. How does that specifically impact the symptoms that people suffer then when it comes to those seasonal allergies.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: You might feel your rhinitis sexing up as you very accurately described the eye watering, itching and etc. It's because our immune systems are reacting earlier. We do have this climate change to account for the increase in these symptoms and increases in these measures. And we also have climate change to consider when we think about the wildfires and the smoke that we inhaled. So now we have this worsening two seasons, the welfare system and the pollen season. But both of those are an injury to our respiratory system. I'm just going to say just climate change is known. It has been quantified to worsen this disease.

MG: How have cities been responding to a longer allergy season? What is it that they've been doing?

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Vancouver, for example, some have some very interesting initiatives. In B.C. we've been seeing a lot of planning around decreasing the carbon footprints and changing the building codes to lessen the carbon footprint and increasing the sustainability of new buildings. In Quebec. They have this very interesting initiative in terms of the type of trees they're planting and how they they want to see more female trees.

MG: They want to see more female trees.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Exactly. The pollen and the fruits and how they each one has their. Specific activities for the reproductive system. And I think also if we add to this, planting more native species will have an extra positive impact, like a bonus impact in terms of having more environmentally friendly cities. Hopefully we'll see this more in the future because we know for sure that climate change will continue to worsen the allergy seasons.

MG: What do you say then to those who suffer from seasonal allergies? They'll hear this and they'll think, Oh my goodness, it's going to get worse.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: I would say that we have to use this as an incentive to contribute to any potential initiatives in our communities and individually that mitigate climate change, that could help us to stop worsening these potential allergy issues. And it's an every day, every moment of the day kind of concern. So I hope it motivates these actions, these communal actions to increase our commitment to mitigating climate change.

MG: Cecilia, it's good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Thank you very much.

MG: Cecilia Sierra Heredia is a lecturer at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. She was in Vancouver. Anne Ellis has been listening in. She's a professor of medicine, chair of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. And good morning to you.

ANNE ELLIS: Good morning.

MG: What's going through your mind as you listen to what Cecilia was saying about a longer, perhaps more annoying allergy season?

ANNE ELLIS: Yeah, it's interesting to see the differences across the country because definitely we've seen a much earlier start to spring pollens and in British Columbia, whereas in Ontario, we've sort of been a lot more up and down and more fits and starts, at least where I am in Kingston. We'll have a couple of really nice, warm days and then it goes back to blizzards and frosting. So it's been harder to predict exactly when spring pollen season's finally going to get up and running. But we certainly have noticed that when you have that delayed start to tree pollen season, it means you have more time for tree pollen to interact. At the same time as grass pollen, which means people who suffer from both tree and grass allergy get hit with a double whammy every spring.

MG: Are you an allergy sufferer?

ANNE ELLIS: I am. Yeah. And it's definitely- we're up and running full speed ahead currently for sure. Most of the birch is settled down, but we do have lots of oak and it does seem to be relatively higher counts than previous years. And we certainly saw that last year as well with higher birch pollen counts than what we have typically.

MG: I was going to ask what you're seeing in terms of people coming in, but in your own experience, are you seeing again with it up and down? But over time, are you seeing changes in allergy season?

ANNE ELLIS: Well, I think the biggest thing is just that the fact that you start off with the first good store where we lose a bunch of snow and then they have people who develop symptoms right away with the from the so-called snow mould. But then there's a bit of a lag before the trees actually start pollinating. And so even though we used to talk about tree pollen season starting in late April, late March, early April, consistently, it's been later than that. So when it's even a week earlier than the last week of April, we think, oh, it started really early this year. But I think a lot of it is because we have such a long winter, we tend to forget how bad our seasonal allergies were until we're back in the thick of them again. With the spring finally does get fully up and running for.

MG: Us and more people are coming in to be treated because of that.

ANNE ELLIS: Certainly last year we had we had a huge boost in referrals from those higher birch pollen levels that even the masks were not sufficient to to block people from getting symptoms.

MG: How are those symptoms worse than perhaps what people were suffering from in past?

ANNE ELLIS: I think it's just the fact that we have more days. If we have more days with the way it's nice and warm and windy particularly, you're going to have more days with symptoms. And I think particularly if tree pollen season hangs on longer than it used to, and now you do have that double hit of tree pollen allergy plus grass allergy. At the same time, that can certainly have a cumulative effect so that your symptoms are worse than they would be if you were only allergic to one or the other, not both.

MG: You know this from experience. When people suffer through this, it's annoying and it just drags on and on and on. Are we getting any better at treating those symptoms?

ANNE ELLIS: So we have lots of great new therapies. It's just frustrating that it seems hard to get that message out there. We have lots of new, very effective prescription medications that we didn't announce five years ago. We have new and better immunotherapies. So ways to actually which we can change a patient's immune system so that you're no longer continuing to have allergic symptoms every time you step outside, but rather you can tolerate exposure to that pollen. We've had allergy shots, of course, for many, many years. But over the past five years we've had these tablets which are safe and effective and patients can take them at home. So you don't need to come into a doctor's office once a week for a needle to get your allergies under better control.

MG: Can you go back to the immunotherapy piece? That's really interesting that as you said, you change it so that people can tolerate what their what they're up against.

ANNE ELLIS: Yeah. So so we as allergists have known this for four decades. It's a way in which we can change some of these underlying immune system to sort of retrain it so that we basically, through the traditional route of injections, we gradually increase the amount of allergen that you're exposed to every week over the course of six months of weekly injections. And that basically gets your immune system to the point where, like, well, I get so much of that allergen under the skin every month. I don't react to it when I breathe it in outside. And it's been highly effective and very useful therapy for a lot of patients. But the requirement for weekly injections for the first six months and then monthly injections thereafter for for at least 3 to 5 years, has made it something that's not as accessible to many Canadians just from the inconvenience of that. But we have, I've been doing it since I started practise. And then in the past five years, we've had access to these tablets that allow the same sort of immune changes to happen. But the first dose is given in the doctor's office and then the rest of the tablets, the patient takes it home at the convenience of their own house as opposed to having to come see the doctor once a week.

MG: You said that it's a shame that people don't know as much about this. I mean, is there a lot of suffering in silence?

ANNE ELLIS: Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of patients either just assume there's nothing more that can be done. They say this is just me, this is my springtime or this is my fall. If you have a ragweed allergy and they don't think to mention it to their family physicians or if they do mention to their family physicians but the family physicians don't understand how burdensome that can be, especially if they themselves don't suffer from seasonal allergies. And I think there is this reluctance to refer to a specialist when in fact, we all just love to treat allergies. It's something we can make people a lot better and one that makes us quite satisfied as providers because our patients are happy because they get better.

MG: It's like there's a stigma around allergies or something like that. Like, as you said, if you don't suffer from them, then a family physician because they may not know what you're going through, might be less willing to to refer you.

ANNE ELLIS: Well, it's a condition that certainly is not associated with a mortality rate rate, but it does have a huge impact on morbidity, quality of life, of patients who have to take days off work or children who have to take days off school because their symptoms are just so intolerable. They can't focus and do what they need to do. And it's a huge economic burden as well, and amount of money that patients will pay for over the counter therapies, some of which don't even work, but can be. You know, again, I will just have a huge parliamentarian of things we can offer to patients to get them feeling better.

MG: I don't know whether you'll say, but what are those over the counter therapies people might want to know that don't actually work.

ANNE ELLIS: Yeah, for some people. So if you have more moderates, particularly if you have moderate to severe allergic rhinitis, you may need to go on to prescription therapies above and beyond what you can purchase over the counter. Or you may be purchasing some of those older antihistamines that don't actually work all that well. So it is important to make sure you're getting what you're purchasing the non sedating newer antihistamines that say non-drowsy on them because some of those older and histamines that are known to cause sedation also just aren't that effective and may not work as well for you as some of the newer options we have.

MG: You run this lab at Queen's University. What is the Environmental Exposure Unit?

ANNE ELLIS: So the Environmental Exposure Unit is a custom engineered facility within Kingston General Hospital. We use it to generate symptoms of allergic rhinitis in patients who do suffer from allergies by introducing in a very controlled way, exact levels of various allergens. So we traditionally did a lot of work with ragweed pollen studies. But the important thing about it is we control everything. We control the temperature, the humidity, the air quality, and we importantly control the amount of allergens. So when you traditionally think about studies that have been done so despite having people take medication on their day to day lives, their pollen exposure varies based on whether or not they're spending time indoors, if it's rained all season. We can have a very controlled exposure where we know that we can generate symptoms and therefore we can look at new therapies to evaluate how well they work for patients who suffer from from allergies.

MG: So it's like an allergen box or something. Like you go in, it's sealed off and then you can, you know, expose the person, not a box, but you know what I mean?

ANNE ELLIS: It's a controlled room, but it seats up to 120 people simultaneously. So it's much bigger than a box.

MG: And and that way you can you can specifically measure the impact of various allergens on 120 people.

ANNE ELLIS: Exactly. And because we've now evolved to study lots of different allergens, we can study ragweed grass, birch, house, dust mite. We even did a study where we could expose people to air pollution as well as ragweed pollen to look at the impact on co exposure of diesel exhaust with ragweed, to show that if you get exposed to both, your symptoms are worse than if you're just exposed to the ragweed alone. And then we could evaluate the therapy to see if we could improve those symptoms.

MG: For people who are suffering, give them a look around the corner. What are what are some of the things that you're cooking up in the environmental exposure unit that might help them down the road?

ANNE ELLIS: So we're always studying new therapies. We're also just trying to get a better understanding of what the impacts are of allergies on, for example, your ability to do your day to day activities and your ability to focus and concentrate. But there are some promising therapies that are coming down the pipeline. Hopefully they will work as well in our hands as they did in the earlier what they call phase two trials. So, yes, please stay tuned. There's lots of interest in trying to get better options out there for allergy sufferers.

MG: There is hope on the horizon.

ANNE ELLIS: Yes, I would say so.

MG: In the meantime, as Cecelia said, this is just going to get worse. Climate change, she believes, is exacerbating what people are suffering through. How does climate change factor into the work that you're doing in the unit?

ANNE ELLIS: Well, it makes it a little bit more challenging for me to time my studies. So I do studies again, even using the environmental exposure unit where we typically actually want to have all of our challenge in the off season when there isn't a lot of other allergen in the air. So we know exactly when it's the pollen challenge, for example, that we're doing that, giving people their symptoms or it's just the ragweed that's giving them symptoms and nothing else. So it's really important for me to be able to predict when is the tree pollens even going to start back up again in the spring so that we can finish off our other studies before then. Also, on the other hand, we actually do a lot of studies that want to be done or do we want patients to be experiencing symptoms in the normal season because we might be doing an outpatient study where the particular interest is to have lots of patients all across the country all experiencing regular allergy season symptoms in the real world. And so I need to know, just as importantly, when the seasons start and stop so we can time our our study visits accordingly.

MG: Just finally, is your sense that the health care system is prepared for a lengthening allergy season and perhaps a more intense allergy season?

ANNE ELLIS: So, I mean, at least most of the therapies that we use to treat hay fever or allergic rhinitis are relatively affordable and not too burdensome from a financial perspective on the patients who need to take these therapies. The concern that we might be a little bit more wanting to pay attention to is those patients who have allergen induced asthma. And if you're somebody whose asthma gets worse during a pollen season, that can have a much more impact in terms of emergency room visits, possibly even needing to be hospitalised because your asthma flares so badly during the policies. And if you're not keeping on top of your regular background control or therapies and seeking help when you start to get into trouble. So potentially, I could see from an asthma perspective a little bit more drainage on the health care system if we continue with these current trends.

MG: Something to be aware of. And it's great to speak with you. Thank you very much.

ANNE ELLIS: Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

MG: And you take care. Bye bye.

CECILIA SIERRA HEREDIA: Bye bye.

MG: Anne Ellis is a professor of medicine and chair of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at Queen's University. Your thoughts? Are you experiencing seasonal allergies? Do they seem worse now than in years past? Let us know through the sniffles and the sneezes. You can email us the current@cbc.ca. Your CBC News is next.

Speaker 4: [sc]

And then Dave fetched a hammer from the basement. And then, like a Spanish conquistador, Dave raised the hammer over his head and swung it at the wall with all his might. Hiiiya.

MG: Dave has an odd job to do. It involves electrical wiring. You know, this is going to be good. The Vinyl Cafe is next in 6 minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Vinyl Cafe: Odd Jobs

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, this is the weekend that many Canadians really start heading out into the wilderness. You might actually be listening to this right now on a dock or in a tent. It's beautiful out there in the mountains, in the forests. But being out in nature also means more face offs with the critters that want to steal your camping lunch or chew a hole through the cottage roof. A look at animal encounters of the unpleasant kind. Coming up in just under 30 minutes. But first, Dave, Morley and the quest for a better place to put their toaster.

[Music: Theme]

MG: It is a tradition that started at the height of COVID restrictions. Here at the current Little Holiday Treat featuring some vinyl cafe, life has gone mostly back to normal for many of us, but we thought, why not keep that tradition going? And so once again, on this holiday Monday, here's the late, great Stuart McLean and one of the Vinyl Cafe's most requested stories. This is Odd Jobs.

SOUNDCLIP

STUART MCLEAN: It was on a Saturday. In September, the Dave and Morley sat eating breakfast and Morley looked at the toaster and said it would work so much better if we could plug it in at the table so we wouldn't have to get up and walk across the kitchen every time someone wanted toast. It was just an idle thought, but it struck her as a good one. So then she said, Maybe we should get someone in to move it. The next morning, Dave was sitting alone at the breakfast table, looking at the toaster on the other side of the kitchen, thinking I should move the plug myself. Morley was at work. They were opening a new play. The kids were still asleep. Dave had the whole day stretched out before him like a white line running down the centre of a highway. How complicated could it be for an old roadie? How complicated could it be for an old roadie to run some wires through a wall and install a plug? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. And what he liked best of all was that he would get to knock holes in the kitchen wall. It felt good just thinking about that. Dave fetched a hammer from the basement and then, like a Spanish conquistador, sealing the fate of his troops by burning his ship as soon as his last man stepped on shore, Dave raised the hammer over his head and swung it at the wall with all his might, Hiiyah. The hammer sunk into the wall with a pleasing thump. A few more quick swings and Dave had a hole the size of a melon. He stood back and admired it, and then he wondered where the wires were going to come from. He thought maybe he should check his big Reader's Digest book of home repairs. He knew he could probably figure this out without the Reader's Digest help, but there could be no harm in checking. The book wasn't upstairs. It wasn't downstairs either. It wasn't anywhere. He wondered if Jim Scofield, his neighbour, had his repair bar. He glanced at the kitchen clock. Jim was the kind of neighbour you visited rather than phoned. I don't have your book, said Jim, but I have a new mallet. I can't believe you started without me. Let me go get it. Jim and Dave stared at the hole where Dave wanted to put the new plug. But where is the wire coming from? Asked Jim. That's what I was wondering, said Dave. Jim pointed at a light switch by the back door. There'd be wire over there. We could patch into, he said. And then he smiled. Of course, he said. We'll have to punch a hole in the wall to pick it up. Jim was fiddling with his new mallet. Be my guess, said Dave. Are you sure? Said Jim, moving towards the back wall, not waiting for an answer. There were wires there. In fact, when Jim stepped back and they both peeked in his hole, wires were about all he could see. All sorts of wires, black shiny wires, grey cloth covered wires. Jim pointed at a grey wire, running through a porcelain insulator. Knob-and-tube, said Jim, I didn't think that stuff was legal anymore. Oh, those aren't live, said Dave. I had an electrician in to replace all that a couple of years ago. Dave reached into the hole with a screwdriver and jiggled the old wire. There was a sudden puff of smoke, and Dave gasps on the right side of his body, jerked spasmodically and a deep alien like moan rolls out of him, and a screwdriver is flying across the kitchen and over in like a tomahawk ricocheting off the kitchen sink and disappearing through the window. There was a moment of stunned silence. Jim and Dave both staring at the broken window, shards of glass tinkling to the floor. Could you do that again? Says Jim. I like the way that ship of porcelain from the sink followed the screwdriver through the window.

[Laughter]

STUART MCLEAN: A minute later, Burt Turlington, who lives next door, is ringing the front doorbell, standing on the stoop with Dave's screwdriver in his hand. This yours? He asked. We're moving some wires, says Dave. I got a shock. You're moving wires, says Burt. I got one of those power drills for my birthday. Maybe I should bring it over. Something inexplicable happens when a man picks up a tool to do home repairs. Some force is yet undescribed by science, but nevertheless well known to women. It's a force that lures men away from their families and the things they're supposed to be doing to a place where hammers are being swung. Maybe the act of a hammer moving through the air sets off a cosmic thrumming only men can hear. Or maybe when a man picks up a screwdriver, he releases an odour. Only men with tools can smell. It's a musty, yeasty, sweet sort of smell. Well, the handle leather and WD 40. And men in their backyards, raking leaves and men in their basements listening to ball games on portable radios or seised by this odour only they can smell. It seises on them like the urge to migrate seises lesser species. And suddenly they're thinking, I don't belong here anymore. I belong in another place, and I should be doing something else. And I should take my coping style with me just in case. Men can sense it when a wall is coming down and they can't help the fact that they have to be there to watch it fall. Or better yet, help push it over. It's been argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall had nothing whatsoever to do with the collapse of communism. It was just a weekend project that got out of hand.

[Laughter]

STUART MCLEAN: Carlo Beer was the next neighbour to arrive at Dave's house on that Saturday we're talking about. He burst through the front door without knocking. Dave and Jim looked up and he's standing in the kitchen. Hi, said Carl, trying to slow himself down, trying to act nonchalant. Need any help? He's carrying a bright yellow thing about the size of an electric drill, except more dangerous looking. It looks like a cross between an Uzi and a woodpecker. It's his reciprocal saw. Carl got the saw last Christmas. It's his pride and joy. But there are only so many holes a man can cut in his own house before he is told to stop. At the end of August when Carl's wife, Gerda, went downstairs with a load of laundry and found Carl cutting random holes in a sheet of plywood. She took the saw away from him, and later she said he could have it back if he stood in front of the house on Saturday mornings with a sign around his neck. Need holes cut. By noon, there were seven men in Dave's kitchen. Two of them friends of Jim Scofield, who Dave had never met before. Guys with tools. There were now a series of 12 melon sized holes. Punched in the kitchen wall at two foot intervals, bleeding from the light switch by the back door to the hole where Dave intended to install a plug for the toaster. 12 holes and seven busy man. Jim and Dave rotoring putty out of the broken window. Phil Harrison sucking up plaster dust with Carl Lo Beer Shop VAC. The two men Dave didn't know racing a pair of belt Sanders along the floor. Six power tools operating at the same time in Dave's house. Sam arrived downstairs, rubbing his eyes, taking in the chaos of this kitchen and asking, asking the most reasonable question. What's for breakfast? Toast said Dave. He said this without turning the rotor off or even turning around. Sam stared at his father's back for a moment, and then he shrugged and dropped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. Then the lights went out. And the tools died. And in the sudden an overwhelming silence, someone, Bert Turlington, I think, said, Do you smell that? And then there was smoke hanging in the air like wisps of fog. And someone said, we overloaded the wires. The wires are burning, cut the wall open over here. And Carl Lo Beer jumped up and said, My saw works on batteries. And he lurched toward the wall, rubbing his reciprocal saw in front of him. And before anyone could stop him, Carl had cut a hole in the wall the size of a loaf of bread. Not there, said Bert Turlington. Here. Come in. Coming, said Carl. Putting a second hole five feet down the wall. Sam's eyes as wide as saucers. I've got a fire extinguisher in the truck, said one of the men Dave didn't know. They found the remnants of the fire with the third hole, a mouse nest, leaning against the overheated wires. It had burned itself out. The man with a fire extinguisher gave it a blast just in case. At 12:15, Dave took stock of what they had accomplished. The broken window, the chipped sink, 15 holes, the sodden plaster where they had used the extinguisher. Arnie Shellenberger looked at Dave and said, Ah, Dave, when's Morley coming home? Dave said, not until tonight. Not until 10:00, 11:00. Arnie said, There's an electrician I know from the plant. He might come over. If you did the window, he could do the wiring and we could patch the holes by. He looked at his wrist. 10:00? You need this done fast, right? Dave nodded. The electrician pointed at the back wall of Dave's kitchen. We're going to pop out the drywall. We're going to take that wall down to the studs. That way I can get it everything at once. Dave was looking worried. It'll be the fastest, said the electrician. He looked at Carl cut around the top of the ceiling and along the baseboard will pop it out, nice and simple. Carl was beaming. Morley came home soon after nine. When she turned onto their street, she noticed her house looked strangely dark. She pulled into the driveway and parked the car and gathered an armful of junk, her purse, a sweater, some files. She headed toward the back door. She was exhausted. She dropped a file and stooped to pick it up. And it was only then. Only then that she noticed the warm glow of candles flickering through the back window. And she felt a wave of affection roll over her. Dave had made a romantic meal. She had barely eaten all day. She was smiling as she opened the back door. She put her purse down and called. Hello. And then she stopped dead in her tracks. Sometimes you're confronted by things that are so far from what you expect, that there's a... There's a momentary disconnect. Your brain is unable to process what it is looking at. Morlyy looked around her kitchen, there were candles everywhere and flashlights and snake lights and men. There were four men in her kitchen, all of them on their hands and knees, four strangers on their hands and knees staring at her the way a family of raccoons might stare at you. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she was able to take in more details. The men were holding tools. There was a pile of pizza boxes on the floor and an empty case of beer. And Sam, her son Sam, sprawled out beside the pizza box, asleep. Her son passed out. This was her kitchen. But two of the walls were missing. She looked at the men again. One of them stood up. Hi, I'm Teddy, he said, the electrician. We'll have this cleared up in just a minute or two. And then she saw Dave, her husband, crawling towards her across what was left of her kitchen. He stopped about ten feet away. Hi, he said. And then he waved his arm around the room, at the broken window, at the 15 holes in the wall, at the back wall, which had completely disappeared. And he said, We're fixing the toaster. Morley's mouth opened, but no words came out. It closed and then it opened again. She seemed to be trying to say something. Dave nodded, trying to encourage her. Like they were... Like they were playing charades. Her mouth kept opening and closing. But no sound came out. And then without saying anything, not one word morally turned around and walked out of the house and got in her car and backed out of the driveway and Dave said, It's okay. She'll be back in a minute. And Bert said, I think I should be going. And Carl said, Me too. And Dave said, Mate, maybe if we could just get the power on. Morally wasn't back in a minute. She wasn't back for nearly an hour. When she returned, she walked across the kitchen and opened the freezer door and about a cup of water trickled onto the floor and she let out a muffled sob. Dave helped her empty the freezer and they deposited plastic bags of food in an assortment of neighbourhood fridges. They're all within easy walking distance, Dave pointed out helpfully. The renovation took six weeks to finish. Dave worked on it alone until the middle of the next week. Then everything seemed to be working fine until Sam came home from school and showed them how he could turn the microwave on with a TV remote. So they called in an electrician to finish the job. A methodical and trustworthy man. It was the electrician who spotted the lead pipes running into the upstairs bathroom. And he said, if you want to have them replaced, you might as well do it while you have the walls down. So they had the plumbers in and had the entire upstairs bathroom redone and downstairs where the back wall was, Morley had one of those bay windows put in. Which is something she's always wanted. And she has a herb garden going in the window space. They was admiring the plants the other evening, standing in the window and looking out into the yard, admiring the new view. It's a beautiful window. And he likes that, especially in the morning when the light is soft. Last Saturday, Dave and Morley were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper, and the kids were still in bed and it was lovely to be there together. The sun drifting down on the coriander, Morley sipping her coffee and then standing up and walking over to the counter to make some toast. Don't you think it would work better if we could plug it in at the table so we wouldn't have to get up and walk across the kitchen every time someone wanted to use the toaster?

MG: That was Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe story, Odd Jobs at first aired on CBC Radio in the year 2000. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. We take you away from Stewart McLean's small town Canada, all the way to the village of Modena. It's in northern Italy between Florence and Milan and to the north of the peaks of the Alps. Near Modena, though it is rolling green hills. You can almost picture it now that we're in Italy. We're obviously ready to eat. Modena is home to some of the best restaurants in the world. And in the kitchen of one of those restaurants is a chef born in Montreal. Reporter Megan Williams will have the full story of chef jessica roosevelt tomorrow on The Current. But here's a little taste of what you can expect.

SOUNDCLIP

MEGAN WILLIAMS: So Jessica Roosevelt is the head chef at this deluxe being be called the Casa maria Luisa, which is just outside of Montana in this flat, verdant countryside along the Po River at this magnificently restored Stone Manor, owned by Massimo Bottura, who is the head chef at that very famous three star Michelin restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which is in Modena and has twice been named the best restaurant in the world. She was born and raised in Montreal in a big blended Anglo, mostly Jewish family. She started working in restaurants in her teens as a host, but she was always poking her head into the kitchen, and when she was 18 or so, she dropped out of a job to go to culinary school. She went to the Institut Italier du Québec, and she was kind of discovered there by Montreal's chef [unintelligible]. And so she worked for him for a while. And then she moved to Whistler to work for another top chef, Melissa Craig. So when she was 27, her her then boyfriend got accepted into a masters programme in Milan, and so she decided to get a work travel visa for a year and go with him. But her plan in Italy really wasn't to work as a chef at all. It was to travel, maybe do a few short stints in an Italian bakery or butcher. But then for her 28th birthday, which was just a week after she arrived in Italy, she went to Osteria Francescana, this famous Italian restaurant, very expensive, where you have to book months in advance, which she did. She booked while she was still in Canada, but she'd heard about its chef Massimo Bottura and had to go.

SOUNDCLIP

And at the time he was serving a menu that was called Vini in Italia Carmen. So come to Italy with me, you know. And it was this 12 course meal of dishes that were telling the story of the territory, of the beauty, of the poetry of this country. And I felt like I was discovering so much about this new place that I was in just through these dishes. And I was so blown away by that experience that I'd practically beg Massimo to give me a chance.

MG: So she gets the check, the substantial check for this dinner and kind of hits him up for the job as she's paying the check.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, no, she she chatted with him that night, but she didn't she didn't hit him up for a job that night. She said she she went home. She woke up the next morning and she realised that that experience, that meal, she was facing a turning point in her life. Like she she felt it was an, a, a really important moment in her life. So she wrote him this heartfelt, emotional email. And while I was there with Jessica, I actually met Massimo Bottura. So I'll let him tell you about this email.

SOUNDCLIP

Now because their email was the words that she used in that meal was really, really, really catch my attention. So we were we needed, we needed to open the kitchen to new to fresh energy, fresh culture. And I read these beautiful mail. So I wrote Why not? Why not?

MG: Why not? Indeed, just the beginning of Jessica Roosevelt's journey as a chef. The journalist Megan Williams will join me tomorrow on the programme to tell us the rest of the story coming up after your regional update. Pretty awesome to spot the big antlers of a deer off in the forest or an eagle soaring overhead. A bear in your garbage or a squirrel in your attic? Well, not so much. When animals steal, break and enter or otherwise break the law. It's coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and this is current.

Back To Top »

Author Mary Roach examines the world of animal crime

Guests: Mary Roach

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This is a case of breaking and entering. The suspect's going right to the kitchen to look for food.

VOICE 2: McLaughlin was walking along popular Flagpole Trail just outside Nelson near the summit. He realised he was being tracked.

VOICE 3: And notorious, for one thing, holding people to ransom.

VOICE 4: A man from the [unintelligible] area got quite the surprise over the weekend. He was in the middle of harvest when he encountered two unwanted guests in his house.

MG: Home invasion, stalking, mugging, trespassing. In these crimes, the perpetrators are not humans. They're animals, bears, cougars, macaques. These are just some of the creatures that Mary Roach encounters in her new book, Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law. It explores the science of human wildlife conflict, which takes Mary Roach from Alleyways and Aspen to tea gardens in India. I spoke with her in October, and when we talked, we spoke about subjects that are just as relevant today as they were back then. Canadians are heading out into the wilderness as the weather heats up. Here's our conversation:

MG: When nature breaks the law, can you explain for people? I mean, we'll talk all about how nature breaks the law, but what exactly does that mean?

MARY ROACH: Well, obviously animals are not following our laws. They're written for us humans. They're following their instincts. Nonetheless, they do commit what we consider crimes breaking and entering manslaughter, jaywalking, trespassing, littering, you name it, vandalism. So for me, it was just kind of a fun and relatable way to bring people into the topic of human wildlife conflict, which is what the professionals in that world call it.

MG: Would you have imagined when you entered this book that you would find yourself sitting beside a bird scarer scoping out seagulls before the Easter mass at the Vatican?

MARY ROACH: No, that was a lovely surprise. That was something I stumbled on to the Vatican's gull problem through a video that circulated quite widely a few years ago. Although I missed it then of the pope releasing a piece dive, a white dive as a gesture of peace. And then this gull flies in with its beak open and attacks the thing which I thought was a lovely irony. And in looking into that, I discovered the Vatican has some other issues with gulls, vandalism in particular, just before the pope comes out to say Easter mass, there's a huge and very elaborate floral display. And a couple of years ago, for no apparent reason, this group of gulls came in and just knocked things over and pulled things around. Roses were strewn everywhere. And so they were trying to prevent this crime of vandalism from happening again. And thus myself and the laser scarecrow spent some time together. Actually, it made it sound as though it's a moving living scarecrow. It is a laser box that is operated and designed by a person who sells these things. So.

MG: And it does what exactly?

MARY ROACH: Imagine a beam at a discotheque, kind of, you know, going around in circles. It's it's just one colour, though, and the beam, it's a green beam. And apparently, though, who knows, you'd have to ask the gulls. Apparently, in low light, a laser beam, particularly a green one, looks like a solid object. So it appears to the birds that someone is swinging a large Star Wars light sabre at them and they vamoose.

MG: This is an example of wildlife getting into places, perhaps where humans do not want the wildlife to be. And you might think seagulls would be annoying, but not particularly dangerous. Bears are dangerous and perhaps annoying as well. What have they tried to do in Aspen, Colorado, to get bears out of garbage and out of homes?

MARY ROACH: Well, the main thing that they've done is pass legislation that requires people and businesses to have bear resistant garbage containers, compost containers and restaurant dumpsters commercial dumpsters so they have to be double locking and reinforced. And you'd think that that would solve the problem. It seems pretty straightforward. However, you have to then make sure that people lock them, and it's a little tricky to do and some people don't bother. The thing with Aspen and many of these ski resort areas is these are a lot of these are vacation rentals, so they sit empty. A lot of the time. So bears can easily break in. And also people come from out of town. They don't know that it's a final offence to not lock up the special bear resistant container, or they don't really care because they don't understand the consequences of allowing bears to become dependent on human food. So that's a problem. You have to find someone to enforce those but those rules and find the people who've broken the rules. And that's requires hiring people that the police department in this case doesn't have the budget for. So you've also got to work with the waste management companies, and they may not want to retrofit their trucks or find new trucks that can pick up these cans or in a work with them, whatever. Anyway, it's it's not as simple as it would seem.

MG: And some you need people to enforce the rules as well, which, as you suggest, a couple of people Tina White and Lauren Martinson. Who are they?

MARY ROACH: Yes, there are the folks in a neighbouring ski and mountain bike resort called Snowmass. They are responsible for enforcing the bear regulations, and they are pretty hardcore. They will get inside a dumpster and figure out, OK, there's four people using this dumpster. I'm going to see who put this garbage. I'm going to open up this bag and I'm going to look at the mail. I'm going to figure out who threw this bag in there, referred to as the bear bitches. You need bear bitches, Matt.

MG: If you want the bears to be kept out, you need bear bitches. You take a look at in this book a number of references to Canada. Some of them. I think the mocking is done with with your heart in the right place, but you do have have your eye on Canada. A number of times you talk about what's happening in British Columbia and this is involving bears, but also cougars and other deadly animals. The Wildlife Human Attack Response Training Programme in British Columbia. What is this?

MARY ROACH: This is a week long training in essentially the forensics of an animal attack scene, a fatal attack. So you have a lot of the elements that you would see in a police procedural on television about a, you know, human criminals. So you've got the yellow tape and you've got the body and you're collecting evidence. So it's a part of it is in the classroom. But then we are out in a simulated attack scene and also spent some time at workstations with these mannequins that are soft touch mannequins that have been in a very detailed way, made to look like actual victims of Marling's or attacks either bears or cougars. And our job is to understand the different telltale signs. So you know, you can look at the wounds. You can measure the width between the canine teeth. You can tell by looking at these wounds pretty quickly what the species was, and that's the first thing that you figure out. Then you move on to trying to establish linkage between the victim and the perpetrator.

MG: What does a programme like this do to help answer some of those questions? Because without that kind of forensic work, you can make assumptions and often those assumptions are incorrect.

MARY ROACH: Yes, that's correct. You can. There have been cases in which an animal was assumed to have killed a person when in fact it was a person. And therefore the opposite also has been true where a person has been accused of a killing when it was in fact an animal. Lindsay Chamberlain, the the dingo and the baby, that famous case is one of those. So but it's what I loved about this is that it's a lot of work that's going into making sure that you're not destroying the wrong animal. You know, so say you find a body, someone's been killed and it's clearly a bear. Now you set a trap. There hasn't been an animal on the scene that's been shot. So you set a trap right there and now you have a bear essentially in custody. So what do you do? You make sure by looking at DNA, blood, saliva, the bear in custody, so to speak, is the actual perpetrator and if not, you release it. And that's what happens, which is lovely. I think that care is taken to make sure an innocent animal isn't destroyed,

MG: which is often not care that is applied. I mean, it's easier to destroy the animal rather than do that legwork.

MARY ROACH: That's right, yes.

MG: You go to India to study elephants and again in a book that's about nature breaking the law and deadly encounters with animals. You may not think that elephants, given perhaps people's interactions with them from a distance, would be a deadly animal. What happened?

MARY ROACH: Yeah, this was something that came as an absolute surprise to me. Having grown up with the bar and Dumbo National Geographic. I just don't think of elephants as animals to worry about in terms of your health and well-being. 500 people a year in India are killed by elephants and they're not stalking them. They're not, you know, they're not treating them as prey. It's more that the elephants are coming through. They travel in in family groups and, you know, eight or 10 elephants might move through a village and go stop and eat some farmer's crops along the way. And these are crops that people depend on to live. So obviously they're pretty upset the animals come through at night. People run out, they've got torches, they've got firecrackers. This is not the safe way to do it because it scatters the group. The family group makes them feel insecure and threatened. The elephants panic. The people panic. It's dark. People are running around and people get trampled. I knew this. I had spent some time travelling with a researcher who helps communities put together elephant response teams so that they can respond to these incursions by elephants in a safe way in a vehicle. But and so I knew all this and I talked to a beat officer who is the one who's called in when somebody is trampled or treated more intentionally by an elephant. So I knew what happens. I knew that these owls were dangerous. Yet when I got there, when I got to this place, we were staying, which was right near a sign saying it was an elephant crossing area, the first thing I wanted to do, and it was already past dusk, the wrong time to be out. I wanted to go there because I wanted to see elephants, you know?

MG: Fair enough.

MARY ROACH: I really wanted to see them, and the researchers just kind of looked at each other and said, Well, please be careful. And then they kind of like, set down their tea and they're like, We're coming with you. And we stood around maybe five minutes and it was clear that they were not comfortable. These are people who really, really know what elephants can do. And so after about five minutes, they said, Let's go back inside. And so that's what we did. Yeah, but I just it was very hard for me, even even then, to to feel that this was a dangerous and stupid thing to do

MG: here in this part of the world. I mean, it's not elephants that perhaps people are concerned about encountering after dark. If you're driving, it might be deer, it might be elk, it might be moose. If you happen to are, you're lucky enough to live in a part of the world where there are moose in the countryside. What did you learn about why it is that deer freeze in the middle of the road when a car is coming towards them? This is fascinating.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, deer. Well and the animals that are prey, like deer who are often stalked hunted by other animals, they have evolved along with these predators over time. And they've developed a pretty keen sense of like, OK, how close can that predator come before I need to really flee? Now the car or the truck is considered by a deer, say a predator. It's a large thing coming at you. They're like, OK, it's some kind of weird metal predator. So they try to apply that kind of logic that they have, that cognitive ability to judge distance. But they haven't had time to evolve any kind of sense of how quickly they need to flee because they're going 50 or 60 miles per hour. So they're not good at judging, you know, looking at how big it's looming. The thing is coming closer and it's getting bigger. And that and how quickly it's getting bigger tells you, OK, this is how fast it's travelling. And we humans are not that good at that, either. The fast, really fast moving car. We're not that good at figuring out how long we've got to cross the street. Now, night-time, when all the animal sees, are these two pinpoints of light, the headlights, those don't loom very effectively. So the deer, if you imagine the deer standing there, just looking at these pinpoints of light kind of going through little lights coming, maybe moving, I don't know. Boom, it's not clear to the deer that this is a thing travelling at them at a respectable speed. So that's why they appear to be just standing there staring at the headlights, or that is that's the theory. And one of the ways the National Wildlife Research Centre here in the U.S., one of the researchers there is, he's no longer there. But. Well, what his idea was to install a light bar on the floor facing the vehicle on the front of the vehicle, so you're illuminating the grill. And now an animal in the road can see, OK, this is not just to pinpoints of light. This is a thing and it's coming closer. I can see it getting bigger as it's coming closer, so it just gives them more information about what this thing is doing. It's coming at me. I should get out of the way and it appears to help. I went out with the researcher when they were gathering some data and which amounted to being in the truck and driving a deer in the road. Yeah, a lot of deer in the area not hitting. We didn't hit anybody.

MG: How much of this I mean, when you take a look at the encounters that you document in this book, how much of this is about our incursion onto their territory? Well, we talk about these. Animals, you know, breaking our laws. But how much of this is about us being in their space?

MARY ROACH: Most of it. Most of it, for sure. I mean, there are I mean, if you go back far enough, all of it. But when you look at, say, the macaques in urban India, I mean, for one thing, we are expanding our range at the same time. Some animals are expanding theirs. You know, for example, a building ski resorts in the mountains, this is prime bear territory and we're moving in. And then we complain when the bears break into people's houses and cabins. In New Delhi, it felt like the monkeys were kind of moving in to take advantage of a really bounteous food situation. So to a certain extent, it's we're moving into their territory, but it's also we are happily supplying them with delicious and tasty and nutritious foods. So we're also sort of welcoming them and calling them in by not securing food or in India, particularly with these monkeys outside the [unintelligible] Temples, people are feeding them as a sort of offering. So they both want the problem to disappear, but they're also encouraging it. And it's very vexing problem for the the people who are supposed to fix the situation.

MG: Part of part of the shapes, it shapes how we think about those animals. I mean, you talk about the language that we use that we call things certain things pests. What's wrong with? What's wrong with a word like that?

MARY ROACH: I think when we refer to a species as a pest, it. It gives us, first of all, we're looking at this animal completely in the context of us and our lives and what how we want the world. We're also by using the word pest, I think we give ourselves permission to just think of it as something to be dealt with. You know, it's no longer an animal with behaviour and a life cycle and things that it needs and wants to do. It's just an inconvenience and it's a pest and you call pest control or you call the wildlife control operator and you have this kind of permission to kill it, whatever. Just get rid of it and not really give it much thought. I think it it allows us to not be very thoughtful about it. I mean, you look at how you know, laboratory animals in this country, there's a very detailed protocol for how those animals are kept, how they're treated and how they're euthanized, and we don't have any such thing for the animals that we call pests.

MG: How we deal with them, I mean evolves as well, we are now a society that's in a deep conversation about things like gene editing, which you get into and people think, well, if it's just bothering me, if it's a pest like the wasp that stung me yesterday or something like that, maybe we could get rid of it. When you hear about that and you tease this out in the book, I mean, what goes through your mind?

MARY ROACH: What goes through my mind? Gene editing in one sense, it's kind of the birth control of the future. OK, you could say, Well, now we can edit the genome and in a way that this animal only gives birth to males now doesn't give birth to females. So that's going to peter out pretty quickly and say, you are. You have an island where there's invasive rats and there are mice and they are. Destroying seabirds or harassing them or eating their eggs so you could save the biodiversity of this island by getting rid of the mice or rats in this humane way, and it sounds very appealing. But this technology is being developed by in this country, the National Wildlife Research Centre, which is part of the USDA that is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And there is an eye, going forward, toward using this to deal with, not with protecting biodiversity and getting rid of an invasive species on an enclosed and limited geography like an island. But what about if we used it to get rid of an agricultural pest, say blackbirds or say moles or voles, which create a lot of problems in the agricultural world? Where do you draw the line? If you look at the list of animals species that are considered pests by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, it's pretty surprising you got cormorants and swans and beavers and bobcats, chipmunks. I mean, a tremendous number of species cause problems for the world of agriculture and and ranching. So when you let. The USDA and the agricultural industries bottom line, make that decision, and I'm not saying that has happened, and I know there's a lot of careful attention and thought being played to this, and nobody is rushing into gene drives and genetic modification for that purpose. But it is, I think. An end point that appeals to that world, so that's what I think it makes me a little uncomfortable.

MG: How do you see the way that you think and write about the place of science in our world? What do you see as as as your role in getting us to think about these sorts of things in the books that you write?

MARY ROACH: People call me a science writer and I guess that I am. But I think myself more as kind of a a gateway drug to science. I write books that touch on science for sure and then explain things in the world of science. But I write them for people who may or may not think that they're even interested in science. You know, there are people like me who took science in high school and college and said, or who didn't take science in high school and college because they thought it was a grind and a slog, and they thought it was going to be boring. So and it's not, I mean, how could science be boring? It is the world. Everything in the world is part of science. So, you know, to say that science is boring isabsurd, though I myself used to think that. So I'm trying to extend a hand to the world, I guess, to say, look, this is really interesting in an entertaining and you will enjoy reading this book because it's fun, and I've tried to make it as entertaining and interesting as I can. But I als want people to come away with an understanding of, first of all, that science matters and that good science matters, and that if we want to get out in this case, if we want to get out of some of the problems we ourselves have created, we need to have. We need to respect science and support it. And I guess that's my role.

MG: Do you find that people get hooked as a gateway drug that people then say, I want to learn more and I need to learn more after that?

MARY ROACH: It's hard for me to say, but I do know that every now and then I do a book event and I'm signing books and someone will come up and say, I've read your book stiff in high school. It was assigned to me and now I'm a resident at Darida Medical Centre and I wanted to thank you and I have to just get up and hug that person because that to me is so meaningful and gratifying, so I hope that there are a fair number of people out there like that.

MG: I'm really glad to talk to you about this book. Thank you very much.

MARY ROACH: Well, thank you, Matt and really enjoyed it.

MG: Mary Roach's latest book is Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. I spoke with her in October. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q, where the wilderness theme continues. Tom Power speaks with natural history TV legend David Attenborough about how he broke boundaries in broadcasting, the importance of turning nature into entertainment and the unusual role music has played in Sir David's career. That's up next. The Canadian band The Weather Station takes a lot of inspiration from nature for their lyrics and music. We'll leave you today with their tribute to an underappreciated part of this country's landscape - a song from earlier this year, called "Marsh." I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song]

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Monday May 23, 2022 Full Transcript

More Stories Like This