A Short History of Pest ControlA Short History of Pest Control
Pest Control is an essential, often overlooked service, playing a vital role in protecting human health across the globe.
Over the years, pest control has been a hotly debated subject, with the balance between dealing with pests in a humane and safe way, and protecting humans from them a tough one to find.
Nowadays, pest control in Salford is a highly regulated industry, with national companies and local professionals required to meet certain standards to obtain nationally recognised training certificates and qualifications.
It has not always been like this, however, the world of pest control was once very much every person for themselves and has become what it is today through centuries of adaptation and trial and error.
Here is a short history of how pest control became the global industry that it is today.
Farming
Pests have always posed issues for humans, and no more so than in the agricultural industry. As long ago as 2500 BC, sulphur was used to kill insect and protect crops. This is the very first record of insecticide use, and the foundation of pest control as a concept.
Early science drove the pest control industry forward in the centuries and millennia to come, with the Chinese particular made great leaps forward in the use of herbs and oils to repel pests and many of the discoveries that they made are still fundamentally used to this day. Read any guide on keeping insects out your garden and you will undoubtedly find advice on using citrus sprays to warm them off. You probably wouldn’t have realised, until now, that this idea dates back over 2000 years.
Global Travel
International trade changed the pest control industry beyond all recognition. Now, not only did people have to deal with pests from their own country, for which deterrents and control techniques had been developed, but also strange foreign species that they hadn’t seen before and weren’t aware of.
Ask anyone to name common pest species in the UK and several of their examples will almost certainly be species such as the grey squirrel or brown rat. Whilst these are common in all areas of the country now, they are invasive and non-native to this land.
Synthetic pesticides
In around 1940, humans began creating pesticides from inorganic substances. In the decades to come, all sorts of weird and wonderful pesticide combinations have been tried and trialled, with mixed success.
Nowadays, there are strict controls over not only the use of pesticides but also their development and the testing process, but this was not always the case.
In the mid 20th century, pesticides became particularly popular due to their ability to protect crops from insects, and were dubbed as a potential answer to world hunger, alongside fertilisers developed at the time that accelerated plant growth.
Many of the substances used at this time, notably DDT, were later discovered to be harmful to the health of humans as well as pests and have not been outlawed.