The Joy of Pests: encountering autonomy, passion, and death in UK professional pest management

Professional pest management - the deliberate exclusion and removal of unwanted nonhuman life - is a form of overlooked and undervalued ‘dirty work’. Its unglamorous labour carries the stigma of engaging with squalid environments as well as the moral taint of animal execution. In light of this, and in a time of mass workplace alienation - ‘quiet quitting’, ‘lazy girl’ jobs, and dreams of a post-work future - why do so many pest controllers seem to love their jobs?

Drawing on interviews and ethnography with UK-based professional pest management technicians, I reveal an unexpected and unalienated ‘joy of pests’ that is fundamentally grounded in symbiotic more-than-human autonomy. I explore labour autonomy as enacted by independent technicians, and their everyday experiences of camaraderie with competitors and customers, multispecies compassion amidst suffering, and zoological wonder. For technicians managing residential infestations, workdays are inherently non-routine, centred on situated problem solving and require an embodied and enthusiastic engagement with nonhuman knowledges, aka ‘thinking like a rat’. The unpredictability and variety of daily work and the consequently pleasurable challenge it poses emerges directly from the autonomy of the wildlife engaged with. Pests evade routinisation, partly because they are in a state of perpetual bodily and behavioural transformation, engendered by their encounters with the technologies of pest management. Consequently, their increased adaptability to human intervention and thus their ongoing capacity for autonomy and wildness is co-produced by their adversaries, thereby troubling conceptions of domestication.

Speaker: Hannah Fair, University of Southampton, UK