PPC124 | OPINION

Dr Hannah Fair, a human geographer at the University of Southampton, has spent the past few years getting under the skin of professional pest management.

After joining technicians in their vans, talking to pest professionals across the UK and throwing herself into industry events, she shares what she discovered about the freedom, challenge and camaraderie that make so many people genuinely love working with pests.

For the past few years, I’ve been on an anthropological expedition to understand a unique and mysterious culture: the world of professional pest control. I’ve been out in the vans, interviewing technicians online, and attending trade fairs.

While my university colleagues have been busy making maps and testing soil, I’ve carried bait boxes, taken shots off an ice pigeon sculpture, narrowly avoided being stung by wasps, and embarrassingly failed to escape the PestTech escape room.

I’ve been immersing myself in professional pest control in order to better understand how the industry works and what social and economic value it provides, as part of my broader research into how households in the UK manage domestic pest infestations. 

I interviewed twenty-one members of the industry from across the UK, and went out on the job with technicians, seeing how they worked in practice and trying not to get in the way.

I wasn’t trying to achieve a statistically significant sample but instead to understand pest controllers’ experiences in depth, including the challenges they faced in terms of customers’ expectations and attitudes and threats to the toolkit. 

So, what did I find out?

In one of my earliest interviews a pest management professional said to me “I just love the whole job. There's no negatives to it. No repetition”. This sentiment was repeated throughout my research, both by old hands and recent recruits.

I didn’t expect to hear such positive accounts of working in pest control because pest control is what psychologists have labelled as ‘dirty work’. ‘Dirty work’ is characterised by working in physically unclean spaces, dealing with socially undesirable people (or creatures), or carrying out morally tainted actions (such as animal killing). 

Key to the idea of dirty work is that those who do it - the ‘dirty workers’ - themselves become socially stigmatised and their work is devalued, despite how useful it is for society. 

And this lack of public appreciation was clear in the case of pest control. I repeatedly heard about technicians being asked to park away from the home they were visiting, enter via a back door, or to use vans without logos, to avoid the public embarrassment of requiring pest control.

Technicians were refused use of customers’ bathrooms, and their expertise was regularly downplayed. As one interviewee told me: “You're seen as a kind of neanderthal or a knuckle dragger that hits small furry animals with sticks”.

Clearly there are downsides to pest control. It’s underappreciated hard work, dealing with problems most people don’t even want to think about. Given this, I wondered why did so many pest controllers seem to love their jobs so much? 

As one interviewee explained to me, it came down to three key things: “the freedom, the challenge, the camaraderie amongst the people". Freedom. Challenge. Camaraderie, or maybe connection. These are what I describe as ‘the joy of pests’. 

Freedom

For many interviewees, freedom was due to being an independent contractor or small business owner. As one sole trader explained to me “If I'm running my own company, it's an investment for my future and everything for me, for my children. 

So rather than working for somebody and getting paid, at least now I'm working and building something”. This is reflected in the common professional trajectory of technicians being trained up in larger companies and then setting out to start their own businesses.

There’s a question about whether this might shift as there are more mergers and acquisitions and a reduction in the number of SMEs. 

However, it wasn’t just pest controllers who were their own bosses who experienced a sense of freedom. Many interviewees, including from larger companies, described the freedom they experienced over their own schedule as key to their workplace satisfaction and happiness.

One explained that ‘‘holding your own diary and making appointments when you want to and having complete control over your working life is just awesome”. This suggests that increased control and surveillance over employees’ actions (such as van trackers) might be detrimental to their experiences and diminish their enthusiasm for their work.

“The challenges pests present prevent the job from becoming boringly repetitive.”

Challenge

Variety was also key, in terms of the range of pests encountered and the types of work, particularly for those with a balance of residential callouts and regular commercial contracts. Some of the joy also comes from the pests themselves. I remember at PestEx an attendee had anonymously answered the question “What’s the best thing about working in pest control?” with “Killing rats is very complicated”.

The everyday problem-solving challenges pests present prevent the job from becoming boringly repetitive, and they encourage technicians to keep learning and experimenting with new approaches.

Connection

Connection was key in terms of camaraderie with other pest controllers, compassion towards customers in difficult situations, and curiosity towards the pests themselves.

Pest control can be lonely or isolating, even for those working at larger companies, and I saw how important friendships across the industry were.

Even though lots of sole traders are technically in direct commercial competition with each other, I witnessed a lot of generosity, with professionals helping each other to solve problems.  

With residential work it was evident how socially impactful pest control is. One interviewee described how one of the best parts of the job was engaging with customers and “actually just helping them week-to-week, seeing the improvement of their mood. I find it so, so rewarding”. 

Many pest controllers used their fluid pricing structures to act compassionately, provide discounts, setting up instalment plans or bundling in additional visits at no extra cost for lower-income or retired households.

However, dealing with customers could also be one of the most frustrating parts of the job, especially when customers ignored professional advice. Some technicians also found it upsetting to witness the unsanitary conditions some vulnerable people were living in. 

Finally, fascination and curiosity about the pests themselves also brought an extra dimension of enjoyment to the job. Technicians introduced me to the wonder of stored product insects and the mysteries of mouse behaviour. Many seemed to have a ‘passion pest’: those they were most intrigued by and often best at managing.  

Why does this matter?

Perhaps you’re thinking “I could have told you that”. And maybe you did. I’m sure I’ve got some former interviewees among the PPC readership.

But if these findings seem obvious or commonsense to you, that’s a good sign, as it helps validate the accuracy of what I found. And this piece of research wasn’t designed to tell pest controllers something new about themselves.

Its aim is to help those outside the industry understand the world of professional pest control better and challenge some of their assumptions. I’ve shared these findings in much greater detail in an academic article and in a piece on The Conversation, which has had over 40,000 reads, has been translated into French and even got me invited onto Breakfast Radio in Perth, Australia.

I want to encourage people to rethink what sorts of work are enjoyable, valued, and valuable for society. These are pressing issues in a context of high unemployment, fears about AI causing redundancies, and many people feeling unfulfilled and alienated at work.  

What next?

 I feel like I’ve got a handle on the joy of pest control, but I also want to understand some of its more challenging aspects, particularly humane dispatch, as discussed in a previous PPC article.

I’d like to find out more about what ensuring a good death means for pest controllers and how they think and feel about the process. If you’re up for discussing this or having me along with you in the van for a day, you can reach me on h.l.fair@soton.ac.uk or find me on linkedin.com/in/hannahlfair/