Barilla puts those questions out right away and gets right to the point of what he is writing about. He wants to answer these questions for both his own backyard and for his readers. .
In Barilla's first answer to his questions, he travels to New Delhi to explore where the monkeys are and how the neighborhoods manage to coexist with them. When he writes about his travels Barilla states that "The thing about Delhi, however, is that the struggle to find ways to coexist is written in high relief there. Perhaps more than anywhere else, the city is wrestling with the conflict between its ambitions and its belief, and the monkeys are at the center of this conflict," (Barilla, 76). Here he is affirming that he hopes to learn from this city about their wrestling with the monkeys. He tries to figure out how the city handles the wildness in India and hopes to bring that ability to coexist back in his backyard with the squirrels, termites, and possums. .
During the beginning of his travels, he also states that "I've been thinking of coexistence as an equation with the city as its constant and animal species as a variable. But of course urban life is not constant; it varies depending on where you are on the map and where you are in time" (Barilla, 81). He is saying here that although he wants to try and create a solution for his issues, the variables (animals and environment) are constantly changing, and that may cause a struggle to find a one-size-fits-all solution. Further on in his travels, Barilla reveals that "If you clean up the streets, pick up the garbage, and haul it away before the animals can tear into it and make an unsightly mess all over the ground, you leave nothing for these animals to eat. You will have fewer animals living in the steers, fewer encounters between humans and monkeys, cars and cows," (Barilla, 104). Here Barilla articulates that humans and animals use each other to coexist.