Marlene Zuk would like people to think more about creatures we usually avoid.

Zuk, an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, writes about rats and other urban visitors in her charming “Outsider Animals.” Beginning with the time she was awakened in the middle of the night by raccoons partying on her porch, Zuk describes how looking at them in a new light can help us understand beings we sometimes think of as vermin.

The biologist has had those kinds of conversations with Isabella Rossellini, who blurbed “Outsider Animals” and who was advised by Zuk on her nature videos called “Mammas.” But you don’t have to be a movie star to hear Zuk enthuse about coyotes and cockroaches. All you have to do is read her book.

We chatted with her about why she’s crazy about pests (this interview has been edited for concision and clarity):

Q: Would you say writing the book helped you see these creatures in a new light?

A: It was liking have this little love affair with every animal I talked about. I would tell everyone, “Can I tell you something about rats? Can we talk about raccoons?” It would be really intense while I was writing the chapter.

Q: Including the dreaded rat?

A: The reason there is a rat chapter is my agent said, “Look, publishing people are in New York, they’re obsessed with rats, you’re going to have to write about rats.” I was like, “OK.” Once I started learning more about them, I thought, “Rats! They’re so amazing!”

Q: Because you genuinely like them or because they’re interesting?

A: Both. And this is part of why I wanted to write the book. People don’t give animals enough credit beyond being the poster child for being the thing that gets in your garbage or runs across your kitchen floor. There is so much more to all of these animals than people realize, even cockroaches. The cockroach chapter is my favorite chapter. I love cockroaches so much!

Q: You even made your writing group promise not to say mean things about cockroaches?

A: No one actually said, “I will now welcome cockroaches into my kitchen.” I just think people need to appreciate them for what they are.

Q: Which is …?

A: Wonderful, diverse, interesting creatures that have amazing lives no one knows anything about. The standard cockroach thing, which I get from my friend Allen Moore at the University of Georgia, is that there are thousands of kinds of cockroaches, a very tiny handful of them pests. They’re very diverse. A lot of them are beautiful and monogamous. Come on!

Q: What’s not to love, I guess?

A: I found this book, “For the Love of Cockroaches,” and you have to understand that is not at all an ironic title. The guy is so enamored of cockroaches. You get the feeling, reading it, that he kind of doesn’t grasp how out-there he is.

Q: Do you think the same thing about your book, people not grasping how out-there you are?

A: Of course not. Come on! I’m completely rational and normal about this stuff. When people ask what I do research on, the short version I tell them is “bug sex.” When you work on bug sex, you’re used to being thought of as weird.

Q: Are there animals you don’t like?

A: I feel slightly embarrassed about this but I feel like North America got robbed in terms of marsupials. Opossums are kind of meh. If we were going to get marsupials, couldn’t we get something cute? Why did we get the one with the tail and the teeth? Why did North America not get a better marsupial?

Q: Wait. Why is that embarrassing?

A: Readers of this are going to think, “Here is this insane lady who likes cockroaches and doesn’t like opossums.”

Q: You ask whether there’s such a thing as good and bad animals, given that they’re all part of our environment.

A: Ultimately the answer is no, but the question I think makes you think more about yourself and the criteria you use for judging not just animals but maybe other things. It’s like in “The Wizard of Oz”: “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Maybe even the Wicked Witch of the West had good qualities. So that question of good or bad, hopefully by asking it, I make people think of their way of ranking what they see in nature.

Q: In that case, what’s the best animal?

A: If I said cockroaches, you wouldn’t believe me, would you?

Q: I would not.

A: One big point in the book, hopefully, is to get people to stop seeing animals as though they’re little replicas of people. It’s not just a matter of anthropomorphizing. It’s also this attitude we have, getting back to the good animals/bad animals thing, that certain animals like an octopus are considered cool. There were all those books a while back about octopuses. Why octopuses? Well, they have eight legs and that’s interesting. But spiders have eight legs and people hate them. What the hell?

Q: So in terms of our relationships to “pests,” it’s more complicated than it seems?

A: I’m hoping to show people that there is more to those creatures than they may have thought. To some extent, it’s a question of how manicured you want your world to be. How much do you want every aspect of it to be controllable? I like that life is not controllable and that sometimes you get woken up by raccoons playing on your deck.

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

By: Marlene Zuk.

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 291 pages.

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