The Royal Horticultural Society, arguably the UK’s foremost gardening charity, has had a change of heart when it comes to our garden gastropods and whether we should be poisoning them. But what about other animals deemed pests, or those who simply don’t have a convenient role or value in our human lives? Claire Hamlett discusses.

Whenever it rains and snails dot the wet pavements, I watch my step, often pausing on walks to move snails to a place of greater safety. But not everyone takes such care over the slow-moving molluscs. Indeed, snails and their bare-backed cousins, slugs, have long been considered the bain of a gardener’s life. If you search for them on the internet, many of the results are about how to kill them or get rid of them. Garden centres are full of poison with which to dispatch them (and any other creature that mistakenly ingests it). But the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is now trying to redeem its image by no longer classing them as pests.

The RHS wants gardeners to see the ecological role that slugs and snails play, including eating decomposing matter and being a source of food for animals including birds and hedgehogs. This change of heart is part of the RHS’s broader campaign for ‘Planet-Friendly Gardening’, which it launched last year. While it’s good that an influential organisation like RHS is moving towards a more compassionate outlook, it also feels rather like it is having to do damage control for the prejudice that it has helped to create against these creatures. The current RHS page on snails, which will hopefully get an update soon, leads with an accusation that they “can cause a lot of damage in the garden” and has a whole section on controlling their numbers, including with pesticides. 

I do wonder why it took the RHS so long to start thinking about how it demonises species given that the serious trouble the UK’s wildlife is in has been known for many years. Now it has seen the light on slugs and snails, hopefully, it will soon also update its thinking or many other species it currently classes as pests, and work instead to educate people about their role in the ecosystem and how to keep a balance of species in gardens without resorting to chemicals.

Unfortunately, the murderous mindset that categorises some species as ‘pests’ does not end in people’s back gardens or with molluscs.  

Foxes are not only hunted illegally across the countryside but are persecuted for living their lives in and around the grounds of schools and businesses, as well as in the parks and on the streets of our cities. Fox cubs orphaned after their mother was killed were also shot at a school in North London last year for pooping in the playground and supposedly posing a risk to pupils’ health. There have been fox culls in London, where urban foxes are a common sight, especially after the Christmas period when there is more rubbish left out on the streets for longer. One ‘pest-controller’ interviewed by the Evening Standard said he had shot and killed thousands of foxes over his 30-year career.

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But with public pushback, sometimes foxes’ lives are spared. A cull of foxes on a London golf course was halted in 2020 after campaigners including Animal Aid urged the golf club to choose an alternative humane solution. In 2021, hunt saboteurs raised the alarm about a planned fox cull on the grounds of Coca-Cola’s factory in Sidcup. The soft drink giant apologised for the upset and promised to use a humane alternative.

Rats and mice are among the prime ‘villains’ of the animal world in the minds of many people. While it’s understandable to not want rodents living in your house (though I did cohabit with a mouse for many months without any problems), these creatures are subjected to some particularly gruesome methods of ‘control’. Traps set with bait snap their spines. Poison can cause internal bleeding or death by dehydration. Some kill the animals slowly over days. There are humane, no-kill alternatives, but poison and traps sadly seem to be the most popular methods.

Sometimes an animal comes to be considered a pest simply because it disturbs the neat and tidy aesthetic that people prefer. One recent story I found particularly disturbing was a Guardian feature on a man called Jason Bullard in North Carolina, US, who kills armadillos for money. Driven north by climate change from their native habitat in South America, people in North Carolina were so “perturbed at their lawns being torn up by the newly arrived mammals” that they started paying Bullard to hunt and shoot them.

All too often animals are demonised for simply existing and trying to live their lives. Animal behaviour expert Marc Bekoff argues that calling these animals ‘pests’ “devalue[s] them as if they're non-sentient objects.” Animals often find themselves in urban contexts because humans have taken over so much of what was once their habitat. Sometimes they benefit from living near us, such as by being more easily able to access food and shelter. As Bekoff writes, what we need is a “culture of coexistence”, in which killing is no longer the go-to option for resolving our conflicts with other species. With advocacy from organisations like the RHS, perhaps hearts and minds can finally start to change.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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