Summary

At the outset of Fuzz, in “Maul Cops”, the author attends a five-day Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training (WHART) seminar in Reno, Nevada. In a conference room at the Boomtown Casino, the eighty participants are “led by predator attack specialists” who show slides and videos of animals attacking humans (8). After a lunchbreak, Roach and the others recongregate around training manikins that have been distressed and painted to represent various attack marks. The trainees are tasked with identifying the type of attack that led to the wounds. They investigate if the wounds are perimortem or postmortem to determine if the wounds were inflicted before or after death and ensure that “a bear that was just scavenging [would] not take the fall for a killing” (13). Roach notes that animals have been blamed for crimes committed by humans and humans have...