Pest-busting: An 'evolving' yet seemingly unglamorous profession

SINGAPORE: Pest controllers found themselves in the spotlight recently, after news broke of a rat infestation in Bukit Batok.

But besides hunting down rats, pest controllers are also experts in various types of insects and pests like rats, snakes, monitor lizards and monkeys.

"Pest control is a business that is non-glamorous because you are heading to all those dirty areas that are not so clean in terms of the environment itself, said Afendi, senior manager of operations at PestBusters. Technically, we deal with everything under the sun except one thing - humans."

Afendi has been in the industry for over a decade. He began his career as a service technician and he now heads the operations team at his company. For him, it's something that he's passionate about. "The perspective of the public would be, 'Ewww ... why are you in the pest control or pest management industry?" said Afendi.

When I joined the company 15 years ago, I have got my aunties and my family members saying, don't you have any other jobs that you want to actually do? There are a lot of things that I find enjoyable. Every day you meet with different scope of people, different scope of pests. It's just something ... you cannot anticipate what is going to happen tomorrow. That's how exciting it is."

But everything that he does is aimed at ensuring that the living environment is conducive for humans. In the course of his work, he has become an expert about the various types of pests that exist in our environment.

PestBusters even has a special display cabinet with specimens of the different pests they have caught, which is used for training purposes. When it comes to certain animal species, they know more than the average person does. "The Paradise Tree Snake is very common in landed properties, explained Afendi. We have the Elegant Bronzeback and also the Mangrove Snake. These are the relatively common snakes; almost every now and then we will receive calls to remove the snakes."

Carl Baptista has been working in the industry since he was a teenager. He manages his family-owned business, Origin Exterminators. He has been in the business long enough to know that not all bees are bad.

"Apis dorsata, the giant honeybee, is a very, very aggressive specie, and that's the only one that needs to be removed, he explained. The others don't actually need to be removed but we remove all bee hives in Singapore. With the Apis dorsata, all bee hive removals must only be done after sunset. If you don't do it after sunset, what you can do is you can cause them to swarm and you can actually create a bigger risk to public."

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Pest-busting: An 'evolving' yet seemingly unglamorous profession