PPC119 | MEET THE MEMBER

Carl Morris runs PestBusters East Kent and spoke to PPC magazine about the pleasure of working with family and his pack of pest control dogs. 

PPC Hi Carl, thanks for talking to us today. Did you want to tell us a little bit about how you got into pest control? 

CM I'm 66 this year and I started rabbiting when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I had my first terrier when I was 9 and I had a lurcher when I was about 14. It's been my hobby all my life.

About 20 years ago, I sold my business but I was too young to retire. Before I sold I didn't have time to do it professionally, I just used to do the ratting and the rabbiting as a hobby for a couple of farms. And then I was down on this farm one day and another farmer said “we’ve got loads of rabbits, loads of rats, come sort them out”. I went up there a couple of days later and his sister was there too. She had a farm of her own and asked if I could come over to hers to take a look. So I had about six farms within around two weeks.

Then someone suggested to me that I do wasps. I said no at first, but then I looked at the BASF course and decided to go on that. 

As it started to snowball, I went on a couple more courses and then after a few more years, I took the plunge and did the Level 2 in Pest Management residential course through BPCA. I honestly learned more in that week than in all the years of doing it on my own. It was Paul Westgate who ran the course, and he was brilliant. I think that bloke could motivate the dead.

It just lit my fire, you know, it was so exciting. I remember sitting there, probably the oldest on the course, and I thought “I'm never going to fit in with this”. All these kids are younger than me, they’re going to be so smart. But it really was such a good week, invaluable. 

PPC Fast-forward, and you’ve now owned Pestbusters East Kent for around 18 years? Is it a family business?

CM Yes, it’s me and my daughter, Gemma. We work together and we both have bed bug dogs. She actually did her Level 2 recently as well, but she's been doing pest control for years because I trained her and she’d done some of the other courses too.

She's a great technician, she does a lot of the insect stuff. And she's really exceptional on those bed bugs, we very rarely ever need to go back on a bed bug job thanks to her. She developed that side of the business and we’ve got a brilliant reputation for it now.

She's so good at what she does because she's so passionate about it. And she’s compassionate too; we had these two situations really close together, where these women were single mums and couldn’t afford the cost of treatment straight off the bat. She knew we couldn’t do it for free but she negotiated a payment plan with them over 18 months so that it was affordable for them. She said they shouldn’t have to put up with pests just because they were low income. 

We’re a really good team; I’m the problem-solver and she’s the people person. 

"Working in pest control has a really simple outcome: you've improved somebody's quality of life, essentially."

PPC Did you ever think that you'd be working together? Is it something that you always wanted or did it come as a surprise that she wanted to go into the same business as you?

CM It wasn’t a surprise really, I was in manufacturing for years and she worked with me then. When I told her I was going into pest control, with the rabbits and rats, she wasn't into that side of it. But once people started phoning up about bed bugs, fleas and wasps, she was much more interested. So she shadowed me, did the course and here we are.

And one of my grandchildren, Charlie, he's only 14 and he wanted me to pay for him to do his Level 2 as well, so it looks as though it's going to be three generations in it before long!

PPC What would you say to anybody who's thinking of working with family?

CM Oh do it. It can bring you all together in such a wonderful way. My other grandson, Morgan, comes with me if I'm on a big job. It’s helped me build bonds with the kids. There are challenges still. I think you expect more from your family. But the pros outweigh the cons and if I wasn't in this industry, I'm not sure I’d have the same bond with my grandchildren that I’ve got, it’s helped us spend even more time together. 

And if I don’t mention Eileen my life isn't going to be worth living. She does all our admin work, books our jobs in, she’s a vital part of the business.

PPC What’s your favourite thing about working in pest control? 

CM My passion is integrated pest management, to be honest. I use a lot of working animals in my job; ferrets, two lurchers, two jack russell terriers, two spaniels, two 
Harris’s hawks. 

It’s a good non-toxic approach to pest control and that’s my preferred method. Then I love figuring out how to combine this with trapping when needed, maybe pesticides if totally necessary. It feels good to put a plan together and see it working.

PPC Was that always the case, that you were passionate about IPM?

CM Not really, no. It was the BPCA course and Paul Westgate; he was so passionate about what he does and the way he explained things, it was impossible not to take it on board.He made me realise there’s lots of ways to skin a cat. That's probably not the best analogy to use in this job but you know what I mean!

And I think CPD points feeds into that too, they’re a really good thing. The industry is changing all the time, isn't it? You have to keep up with it, and I've never been on a course where I didn't learn anything.

My mate said to me, “you're 65 this year, what are you still going on these courses for?”. I think it's a very rare person who already knows it all and doesn't need to learn anything new.

PPC Tell me more about your dogs, you said that you’ve been ratting and rabbiting for years? 

CM I have, and my terriers and lurchers are from some of the best lines in the country. I've been breeding them for a long time. I’m a Welshman living in Kent, but my pups sell in Scotland, Yorkshire, all over the place. 

PPC Tell me about the jobs that you do with your animals.

CM They all have their specialities. My hawks, Serendipity and Storm, they do bird control work. My terriers do the rats and rabbits, my spaniels do bed bug jobs. I just love seeing the dogs work and I love seeing the people's faces as well when we've done a good job.

I train the bed bug dogs myself. Initially my terrier, Trixie, would bark when she found bed bugs. After some complaints from a hotel manager who said that disturbed his guests, I started training spaniels to sit at the mark instead. It works much better, fewer complaints!

I do a lot of rabbiting with my lurchers, terriers and ferrets, like a little team. The terriers mark where the rabbits are, the ferret goes into the hole to flush them out and they run up into the lurcher. The ferrets can do rat jobs too, they’re quite multi-skilled like that.  I train working animals and sell them to other professionals too. Most of the dogs I breed end up in working homes. 

I just wish I'd got into it all as a profession 20 years before I did. I was in another business and I was enjoying that, which is great. But now I do feel blessed because now my business and my career are also my lifelong hobby. How lucky is that? It doesn’t get much better than that.

"I just wish I'd got into it all as a profession 20 years before I did... But now I do feel blessed because now my business and my career are also my lifelong hobby. How lucky is that? It doesn’t get much better than that."

PPC Well, you know what they say, don't you? If you do what you love, you won't work a day in your life.

CM And that's the way to feel about my job. It's just a great industry to be in and I'll tell you one thing I want to say about the British Pest Control Association. My standards have always been good, right? I've always worked to a high standard, no matter whatever I've done. 

But since going on that Level 2 course and joining BPCA as a member, I’ve raised that bar right up, my standards have never been higher. We raised our game by doing those things and we’ve both got constant work all the time.

You do your best, always. But if you have that network of support, and someone shows you a better way of doing something, you're going to improve all the time. And that works better for the environment and for the customer too. It's coming full circle now; animals are how they used to deal with pests a few hundred years ago, before all the chemicals. It's now going back to that a bit more, with the toolkit being reduced.

It's the same with the birds and the bird licences, if you can scare them off without killing them, why not? Just because we do pest control for a living, it doesn't mean we want to kill everything underneath the sun. Our role is to control the pests, not eradicate them.

PPC It's been really nice to speak to you.

CM Yeah, I've enjoyed it as well. It's nice to talk about all the stuff that you do, because you can do it day-to-day, but it's not until you actually sit down and you think about everything that you do, that you get a feeling of achievement. Working in pest control has a really simple outcome: you've improved somebody's quality of life, essentially. 

Yes, we get paid for it. But it’s a great feeling to help someone and the job satisfaction in this industry is fantastic. I'm proud that I’ll spend the last years of my life doing it, and getting paid for what I love doing. Honest to God, I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing. The only thing that I'm so annoyed about is that I didn't get into this 20 years before I did.

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