Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper explores an invisibilised mode of knowing rats: how pest controllers learn to become sensible to urban rats’ presence. The paper thus aims to discuss epistemic diversity at play in human-rat entanglements that shape contemporary urban pest control and the ethics of animal killing.

Paper long abstract

Pest control history is closely associated with the techno-scientific project aiming to "erase" so-called pest animals from the urban experience (Biehler, 2013). Science studies have shown the tension and coexistence between ecological and chemical approaches during the 20th century, stressing the role of different forms of scientific expertise on the war on rats (Keiner, 2005). Yet, the everyday knowledge of workers who routinely perform pest control remains invisible. Following an ecological approach to the perception of the environment (Ingold, 2000), I explore the knowledge regime of pest controllers through which they sense, perceive and incorporate rats’ agency in their management practices.

From an ethnography of the municipal department in charge of rat control in Paris, I describe how workers become attentive to forms of animal presence when they inspect potential infestations, tracking material traces generated by animals' actions. I show how this selective regime of knowledge articulates with scientific modes of knowing and killing animals, and its resonances with animal tracking (Gagnol et al. 2018) and maintenance work (Denis & Pontille, 2025). Through their attunement to pests’ lively worlds, pest controllers disclose micro-geographies of urban neglect. This relation, in which pests become both targets and indicators, is mobilised to frame “urban problems” (decaying infrastructure, waste management, etc.) and reorder urban space. By exploring an invisibilised form of knowledge production on rats, I address the articulation between epistemological and biopolitical dimensions of urban ecological ordering, and offer a reflection on the troubled ethics of multispecies entanglements with proliferating animals