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Outsider Animals: How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us

byMarlene Zuk

Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk turns attention to raccoons, rats, pigeons, gulls, snakes, insects, and other animals commonly dismissed as pests or outsiders. She explains the adaptations that allow them to thrive near people and shows how dislike often reflects cultural stories more than biological fact. Their lives illuminate intelligence, disease, urban ecology, evolution, and the unintended habitats humans create. Zuk argues that marginal animals deserve study not because they are secretly lovable, but because coexistence with them reveals how nature responds to disturbance and challenges easy divisions between wild, domestic, useful, and unwanted.

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Publication date

2026-03-17

Format

Hardcover

Pages

312

ISBN

9780691264240