A Matter Of Life And Death

Jamie Byrne is 60 years old and has spent exactly half his life killing for a living. Rats, mice, squirrels, cockroaches and a vast scuttling array of beetles; he's done for them all. Byrne is a pest controller based in Glasgow and he truly enjoys his job.

He is a small man, helpful in a business which often involves crawling into tight spaces. He is bald, has kind eyes, and wears a navy polo shirt embroidered in gold thread with the name of the firm he works for – Zircon Environmental Services.

While everyone else is being credit crunched, these are boom times for ratcatchers. Almost 4,000 calls have been made to pest control officers in Glasgow so far in 2008, a 10% rise on the same period last year. The west end, with its fast-food outlets and tenement back courts often piled high with bin bags, is apparently the rattiest part of the city right now.

Rats – along with their cheeky wee cousins, mice – are the major part of a pest controller's business. Mostly, it's prevention work; you put down poison so that if rats do get in they don't establish themselves. Otherwise they reproduce fast. "In ideal conditions a pair can breed up to 200 rats a year," says Byrne. "But the mortality rate in young ones is around 90%. If every one of them survived, we'd be in trouble."

In 1978, when he started in the business, Byrne would walk around Glasgow city centre on foot, enjoying the architecture. These days he travels in an unmarked white van. Customers don't like it known they have a pest controller visiting. Today is Friday and he has his sights set on pests across the city. Rats in a city centre chippy, rats in a west end business, larder beetles in a south side home, and ants in Maryhill.

You do on occasion get more unusual jobs. Byrne has dealt with termites in an East Kilbride hotel, and a tarantula in an east end supermarket (it ended up being donated to Glasgow Zoo). Once, a man phoned up, convinced that a funnel-web spider had been placed in his conservatory by enemies who wanted him dead.

Rats, though, are the day-to-day. We're talking about brown rats, Rattus norvegicus, which Byrne says measure about 12 inches from head to tail. "People tend to exaggerate how big they are," he says. "They say: 'It was the size of a cat!' Well, if it's the size of a cat, I'm definitely not going in."

Unlike some pest controllers, he isn't scared of rats. In fact he talks about them with a degree of respect and wonder. "People assume that rats are always in dirty places. But they groom themselves anything up to 14 times a day. They are actually very clean animals. They have a chain of command and the strongest always eats first. It's like our society; if you are rich, you have more chance than if you are born poor. Rats and mice are just like us. You have to have somewhere to live, something to eat, heat and water. If you ain't got that, you don't survive. And a rat's body structure is much like man's, which is why they are used in labs; whatever affects us, affects them the same. The poison that kills them does exactly the same thing to us if we eat it."

The poison used is an anti-coagulant. Rats that eat it bleed to death internally. If Byrne finds the bodies, he takes them to Polmadie to be incinerated. It used to be that hospitals would incinerate rats for a fee, but not any more.

I drive with Byrne over to Park Circus and we go down into the basement of a business. Employees have heard rats scuttling above the false ceiling, and he's been here a few times over the past two weeks, lifting panels and putting in small red trays full of the blue grain-like poison. In a cramped back room he stands on a chair and feels inside the ceiling. "That's gone," he says. "The rats have pulled the tray away."

The worst rat scenario Byrne ever had was a business on Union Street. An employee found a dead rat in the shop, so he was called in. He lifted a ceiling panel in the ladies' and there they were. "I counted 26, and had to physically kill them all. I had a wee club and it wasn't easy. Fortunately most were young ones still in the nest."

Is that upsetting to do? "Aye. Although I'm killing rats all the time, actually physically doing it with my hands is different. And the thing is, you really have to get them on the head. The body can take a fair bit of damage. That was quite an experience, not something I'd like to do every day. But if I hadn't, I could have gone back two weeks later and there would have been 126."

Byrne doesn't take his work home. No nightmares about clubbing rats or gassing cute squirrels. He's proud of the good job he does and enjoys helping people. It's amazing how upset clients can get. One young woman is up to high doh, tears and everything, about the mice in her loft. Another girl, who works in a pub, is so rodent-phobic that she can't handle those Clydesdale Bank fivers with a picture of a Robert Burns field mouse on the back.

When Byrne first started in the business, he used to wear a shirt and tie every day. It was a way of reassuring clients that he was clean and professional. It can be dirty work, though. Sometimes you've got to clean up a place just to get to the mice and rats. "Some of the jobs would turn your stomach," he says. "I remember a flat in Falkirk above a pub. The chap had 12 alsatians and he never took them out in two years. Flies and maggots everywhere. You name it, he had it. Then there was a chap in Drumchapel never flung a black bag out. Just stored it up. You walked in the flat and it was bags up to the ceiling in every room. He sat among it in the living room. Just a chair and his cigarettes and the mice."

The trick in disgusting situations is to sing. It distracts you, makes it less likely you'll vomit. Byrne's never been sick yet. He's still learning, too, adding to his bank of knowledge about the beasts that are his foes. "There is no such thing as an expert in pest control," he says. "The day you know it all is the day they put you in a pine box."

Article provided by Zircon Environmental Services