pests, they're just like us

why we love animals, but hate pests

One morning back in 2017, I awoke to itchy, red welts on my arm. I’m no stranger to nocturnal mosquitos, but this seemed different. While changing my bedsheets days later, I noticed a small black bug nestled in the folds of my mattress. Folks, it was a bedbug, and how I view household pests has never been the same.

The first step in any infestation is acceptance: accept that something is feeding on you or those Trader Joe’s plantain chips you left out.

Then comes the disgust for the pest and yourself. Freshly out of college and happily living with four housemates, I eschewed the proper Behavior of Color™. I often wore my shoes in the house, and sat on my bed in my outside clothes. I know, I know. 

I barely survived the third phase: stress and sleeplessness. I vacuumed every inch of my room with surgical precision and laundered my bedding multiple times. But I began to fear that this was just my life now: researching treatment options by day, and afraid to sleep at night, not knowing what I would wake up to. Like Dexter Morgan in Dexter, I now lived with a “dark passenger.” 

Like any scared twenty-something, I turned to the Internet to solve my problems. I tried a few things I saw on the “PestControl” subreddit, and eventually the bites went away. But the shame stayed with me. Although bedbugs are equal opportunists found across every income bracket, especially among the wealthy, they are still associated with squalor. For years, I told no one.

But after mentioning it in passing to a friend recently, I was delighted (can I be delighted about bedbugs?) to hear stories more horrifying than mine. Stories about infestations that caused displacement, and financial hardship given the cost of fumigation. A friend told me about coming home from a library, and opening a book to find a crawling bug between its pages.

My co-fellow, Vera Blossom, told me that her Dad’s neighborhood in the desert was infested with cockroaches. “I’d open a cabinet and one would fall on my head,” she said. Forget unscheduled FaceTime calls, THIS is the stuff of nightmares.

Living in urban centers, you come to expect the occasional pest. If it’s not bedbugs, it’s roaches or mice. It’s overzealous garden chipmunks, or that grabby neighborhood toddler. (I’m pro child leash). It’s the startling hiss of a raccoon while taking the trash out.

If, as Mary Douglas says, “dirt is matter out of place,” pests are critters you would rather not have around. But our response to pests—and their mere presence—says more about how humans live and what we value than it does about them.

According to Bethany Brookshire, author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, pests make us feel powerless where we believe we should have control. Ask anyone in your circle what they do to control an infestation, and you’ll likely see a common theme: violence!

There are people who troll for rats to kill with their dogs, and those who prefer to zap backyard mosquitos (though experts don't recommend this.) My partner, Erwin, once trampled an apartment roach like he was an extra in Stomp the Yard. These are not the responses one feels for animals we’re taught to respect: wildlife and pets. Although, I did have a friend in college who adopted the field mouse nesting in her walls—blurring the lines even more.

While traveling abroad three years ago, I stayed in a hostel with a mosquito problem. I woke up with one eye swollen shut from multiple bites on my eyelid. Just like Dexter Morgan (he’s a serial killer btw), I went on a murderous rampage. I swatted every mosquito in the room, and saved a few to mount on my wall as a warning to others.

With the onslaught of record-breaking fires, floods, and heatwaves, we feel less in control than ever. But we can control what is allowed to inhabit our space. Or, at least, we can try and fail. There are a few rats hiding in my basement as we speak. I’ve Googled “big rat guillotine” more times than I’m proud of.

I spend a lot amount of time comparing green cleaning products, and screening the ingredients in my food. But when it comes to managing pests, I reach for the big red button. The spray with a skull and crossbones on the bottle. That product capable of singeing my eyebrows if I’m not careful. While I would never harm animals, I have little patience for pests.

The label “pests” gives us an enemy to go to war with, and the desire to win the battle. But Brookshire has some sobering news. “If we insist on constantly fighting a war against the pest, I am convinced it’s not a war that we can win,” she writes.  Perhaps the solution is acknowledging that as long as we create a home for them, pests will always be around.

Pests are here because we are. Like us, they are creatures of community. They excel at exploiting a niche. They are a reminder that even the most artificial spaces are teeming with life. 

a real, pest-related text from my mother

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