The Joy of Pests: Camaraderie, Wonder and Dialectical Autonomy in UK Professional Pest Management

Abstract

Professional pest management (PPM)—the deliberate exclusion and removal of unwanted non-human life—is a form of academically overlooked and socially undervalued ‘dirty work’. PPM technicians carry the physical and moral taint of unclean environments and animal execution. Yet, given its low public status and in a time of mass workplace alienation, why do so many pest controllers seem to love their jobs so much? Using interviews and participant observation, this research explores the everyday practices and experiences of UK-based pest management professionals, an empirically novel area of human–animal work. It reveals an unexpected and unalienated ‘joy of pests’ that is anchored in problem-solving variety, camaraderie and zoological curiosity. Invoking the transgressive resilience of pests, this research transposes ideas of autonomy from the non-human to the human. It proposes a theory of ‘dialectical autonomy’: autonomy that is not only dependent on others but produced through relations of antagonism and opposition. The unpredictability and pleasurable variety of the pest controller's daily work emerges directly from the autonomy of the pests that technicians seek to curtail. Meanwhile, technologies of containment generate biological and behavioural changes among pests that inhibit future control. Consequently, the increased adaptability of pests to human intervention and thus their ongoing capacities for wildness are co-produced by their adversaries, while preventing the alienating routinisation of the work, thereby also preserving the autonomy of the labourer. Innovatively using more-than-human geographical theory, this research thereby furthers labour geography's analysis of labour agency, illuminating workers' everyday practices of self-valorisation, encompassing moral concern for the non-human world amidst animal death and displacement. In doing so, it challenges the underestimation of expertise and pleasure found within current theorisations of dirty work. It thus advances understandings of multispecies entanglement, posing discomforting questions about the limits of interspecies coexistence.