‘It makes you feel you’ve got a really dirty house’: what’s behind the UK’s plagues of flies?
Francesca Davies’s living room is absolutely teeming with flies. You can’t enter the contact centre worker’s home without a cluster of insects rising from the sofa or the floor to buzz around your face. Davies and her family live in West Heath, a suburb of the Cheshire town Congleton. Davies’s husband, Alex Andrew, a 29-year-old maintenance engineer, grew up in the market town and he used to think of West Heath as a desirable area, with its well-maintained houses and access to green space. When he and Davies were able to buy a new-build here in 2019 via a shared ownership scheme, they felt incredibly lucky. That is, until they moved in, and realised that every summer swarms of flies descend on their neighbourhood, an issue that is “getting worse”, Davies says.
At the moment, the 27-year-old swats flies out of her young daughters’ bedroom every night before she puts them to bed, and keeps doors and windows closed or covered with fly nets as much as possible. She and Andrew have even bought an industrial fly killer (like the ones often found in fish and chip shops) for their kitchen, as it is impossible to start cooking without attracting even more insects. The pair have become used to the sound of flies “getting zapped throughout the night”, Davies says.
The family have considered moving out of the area because of the flies, and say some of their former neighbours already have. But Davies is reluctant to give up on the house that is her “pride and joy”, she says. “It is a wonderful place to live. West Heath is so pretty, and everyone’s so lovely.”
Not to mention, “You would have to sell it in the winter,” Andrew points out, as prospective buyers would surely be put off by flies swarming around during a viewing. Instead, Davies is attempting to put pressure on the council and the Environment Agency to investigate by setting up a petition, which now has more than 1,000 signatures, asking local authorities “to take this matter seriously and to prioritise our community’s wellbeing”.
The petition has attracted a number of comments from other local people, including one who lives a 20-minute walk away from Andrew and Davies. “I’m shooing 40-plus flies out of my kitchen regularly throughout the day,” the commenter says. “It’s a constant battle.” Andrew says he has spoken to many neighbours who are struggling with the problem: one orders takeaways every day in the summer to avoid having to cook, while another has draped their newborn baby’s cot in a mosquito net. “They’ve all had enough,” Andrew and Davies’s neighbour Bryan Stahl says, when we walk over the road to his house, which the street’s residents generally consider to be the worst affected by the infestation.
Though it’s hard to believe as we swat flies away while we chat, today is a relatively mild day for flies, Stahl tell me, because it is breezier than it has been in recent weeks. At the height of the recent heatwave, the 54-year-old and his partner stayed inside, or in garden chairs under a gazebo walled with fly nets. Davies and Andrew have a similar structure for their garden, which they set up when their daughters want to use their paddling pool. Stahl, a higher level teaching assistant in a school, has spent about £500 on the gazebo and numerous fly screens, he thinks – and is considering forking out thousands more for permanent fly shutters. “It makes you feel like you’ve got a really dirty house,” he says.
Even though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone as anti-fly right now as the residents of West Heath, it’s not as if flies are popular with many people. Whether it’s Jeff Goldblum’s gruesome transformation into a fly in David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror film The Fly, or God sending swarms of flies as one of the 10 plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to persuade the Pharaoh to set the Israelites free in the Old Testament, the messaging is clear: flies are disgusting.
But could they be due a rebrand? After all, bees can be just as buzzy and annoying, and even sting us, but that doesn’t seem to have damaged their “cute” reputation, their likeness printed on T-shirts or tablecloths. Like bees, flies are pollinators and “essential to a healthy planet,” says Andrew Whitehouse, head of operations at the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife. In fact, he adds, there are some plants that are only pollinated by flies – including the cacao tree. “So if you didn’t have flies, you wouldn’t have chocolate.”
And though we might find it gross that flies are so attracted to faeces or rotting matter, it is actually a good thing that they are. “Fly larvae or maggots will eat lots of dead organic material,” Whitehouse says. “In doing that, they’re recycling nutrients back into the soil, they’re getting rid of those things like dead bodies and dung. That prevents the spread of disease as well. So it’s incredibly important.”
In addition, “loads and loads of other animals eat flies”, Whitehouse says. “Spiders spring to mind, but lots of vertebrates as well. So birds and bats and amphibians and reptiles and fish all feed on either adult flies or their larvae. And they’re a really important food source for lots of these animals.”
There are more than 7,000 species of fly found in the UK, including bluebottles, greenbottles, hoverflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and crane flies (daddy longlegs). Houseflies (your classic chunky black fly; probably what comes to mind when most of us think of a fly) are generally considered the UK’s most common, although it is difficult to say for sure, because “weirdly, not enough people study flies”, says Erica McAlister, a fly expert and Natural History Museum curator.
Houseflies are important pollinators all over the world – in fact, McAlister says, a cousin of the common housefly is the dominant pollinator in the Arctic. “People are stuck on bees being the most important pollinators – and they are good, I’m not going to deny that,” she says. But while bee larvae don’t do anything except consume food until they have grown into their adult form, flies are “kicked out at birth”, and as larvae “they’re out there already helping clean up our environment”. And for anyone stuck on the idea that flies aren’t as cute as bees, she urges them to “go and look up a bee-fly”, which she says is “arguably one of the cutest species in the UK”.
Sure, a fly that has been “walking from faeces to food or decomposing food to another food” could be transporting pathogens, McAlister admits – but in “much the same way as if you handle money or if you go into a pub or if you shake hands with people”. As for flies “vomiting” on food, another complaint you often hear from fly-haters, it is not “vomiting” in the same way we think about humans throwing up, she says. “They’re not bringing up gut contents”, but releasing digestive enzymes on to food to break it down, “because they do not have biting mouth parts – they basically have a straw or a sponge with which they can suck up these ingredients.”
Instead of dwelling on flies’ negative associations, she says, “I try to get people to think of them as like, ‘It’s amazing, you’ve got these wild animals roaming around in front of your face.’” McAlister encourages people to learn about flies’ “fascinating” metamorphosis from larvae to adult fly, or the fact that they can land upside down, or that their eyes consist of thousands of facets that act like individual cameras. Every second, “they are processing thousands upon thousands of images”, she says.
It is all the more important to think positively about flies given that insects as a whole, including flies, are largely in decline. Although some migrant species are bucking the trend, the UK’s local species that rely on specific host plants or locations are “suffering badly” as the country becomes less accommodating to wildlife, McAlister says. “We need our politicians to really work at encompassing all of their decisions with an ecological framework,” she believes. And that’s in order to protect our own future, not just the future of flies: “If we die, insects won’t care,” McAlister says. “But if insects die, we are pretty much on a very downward spiral very quickly” – because of our reliance on their pollination services.
McAlister is not saying that we should all be living like Davies and Andrew. She is well aware that flies en masse can be a problem – but killing them, particularly in “a horrible and inhumane way” such as via fly tape, isn’t always the answer. Paradoxically, creating fly-friendly environments such as ponds in gardens, or even “a bucket on the veranda”, invites all kinds of wildlife, she says, including fly predators like birds and frogs, so flies actually get eaten and end up bothering humans less.
“There is an argument” for pest control when it comes to fly infestations, she says, but the most important thing to do is to “find out why that’s happened. Because the flies are an indicator that maybe something else is going on.” When fly infestations are reported, as they are every summer (currently, residents in Sileby, Leicestershire and Llanelli, Carmarthenshire are suffering along with those in West Heath), usually a link can be found “to some sort of waste event or some sort of environmental perturbation”, the curator says.
Davies and her neighbours think their fly problem is connected to a local recycling plant run by the company Tandom. In a statement sent to the Guardian, Tandom says it has “implemented a range of additional precautionary measures”, and is “working constructively with the Environment Agency, Cheshire East council and our independent pest control specialists”, but emphasised: “There is currently no evidence that flies are breeding on our site.” A spokesperson for the Environment Agency confirmed that it is in touch with Tandom, and says it has instructed the company “to take immediate steps to tackle the issue”, adding that it “will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action if required”.
Rather than automatically blaming flies when they bother us, we should look for potential human involvement, McAlister thinks. While we often think of house flies as dirty because they feed on faeces and are found in dirty areas, they actually “have to be the absolute opposite – they have to be exceptionally clean because they are sometimes in a bad environment”, she says. “But it’s our environment; we’re the ones who’ve made this environment. So, you know, we’re throwing stones at an indicator that something has maybe gone wrong.”
Perhaps it’s humans, then, not flies, who are the true pests.
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
From Leicestershire to Carmarthenshire, neighbourhoods are struggling with wave after wave of houseflies. Why are they suffering while others are spared? And is there no…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Francesca Davies’s living room is absolutely teeming with flies. You can’t enter the contact centre worker’s home without a cluster of insects rising from the sofa or the floor to buzz around your face. Davies and her family live in West Heath, a suburb of the Cheshire town Congleton. Davies’s husband, Alex Andrew, a 29-year-old maintenance engineer, grew up in the market town and he used to think of West Heath as a desirable area, with its well-maintained houses and access to green space. When he and Davies were able to buy a new-build here in 2019 via a shared ownership scheme, they felt incredibly lucky. That is, until they moved in, and realised that every summer swarms of flies descend on their neighbourhood, an issue that is “getting worse”, Davies says.
At the moment, the 27-year-old swats flies out of her young daughters’ bedroom every night before she puts them to bed, and keeps doors and windows closed or covered with fly nets as much as possible. She and Andrew have even bought an industrial fly killer (like the ones often found in fish and chip shops) for their kitchen, as it is impossible to start cooking without attracting even more insects. The pair have become used to the sound of flies “getting zapped throughout the night”, Davies says.
The family have considered moving out of the area because of the flies, and say some of their former neighbours already have. But Davies is reluctant to give up on the house that is her “pride and joy”, she says. “It is a wonderful place to live. West Heath is so pretty, and everyone’s so lovely.”
Not to mention, “You would have to sell it in the winter,” Andrew points out, as prospective buyers would surely be put off by flies swarming around during a viewing. Instead, Davies is attempting to put pressure on the council and the Environment Agency to investigate by setting up a petition, which now has more than 1,000 signatures, asking local authorities “to take this matter seriously and to prioritise our community’s wellbeing”.
The petition has attracted a number of comments from other local people, including one who lives a 20-minute walk away from Andrew and Davies. “I’m shooing 40-plus flies out of my kitchen regularly throughout the day,” the commenter says. “It’s a constant battle.” Andrew says he has spoken to many neighbours who are struggling with the problem: one orders takeaways every day in the summer to avoid having to cook, while another has draped their newborn baby’s cot in a mosquito net. “They’ve all had enough,” Andrew and Davies’s neighbour Bryan Stahl says, when we walk over the road to his house, which the street’s residents generally consider to be the worst affected by the infestation.
Though it’s hard to believe as we swat flies away while we chat, today is a relatively mild day for flies, Stahl tell me, because it is breezier than it has been in recent weeks. At the height of the recent heatwave, the 54-year-old and his partner stayed inside, or in garden chairs under a gazebo walled with fly nets. Davies and Andrew have a similar structure for their garden, which they set up when their daughters want to use their paddling pool. Stahl, a higher level teaching assistant in a school, has spent about £500 on the gazebo and numerous fly screens, he thinks – and is considering forking out thousands more for permanent fly shutters. “It makes you feel like you’ve got a really dirty house,” he says.
Even though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone as anti-fly right now as the residents of West Heath, it’s not as if flies are popular with many people. Whether it’s Jeff Goldblum’s gruesome transformation into a fly in David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror film The Fly, or God sending swarms of flies as one of the 10 plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to persuade the Pharaoh to set the Israelites free in the Old Testament, the messaging is clear: flies are disgusting.
But could they be due a rebrand? After all, bees can be just as buzzy and annoying, and even sting us, but that doesn’t seem to have damaged their “cute” reputation, their likeness printed on T-shirts or tablecloths. Like bees, flies are pollinators and “essential to a healthy planet,” says Andrew Whitehouse, head of operations at the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife. In fact, he adds, there are some plants that are only pollinated by flies – including the cacao tree. “So if you didn’t have flies, you wouldn’t have chocolate.”
And though we might find it gross that flies are so attracted to faeces or rotting matter, it is actually a good thing that they are. “Fly larvae or maggots will eat lots of dead organic material,” Whitehouse says. “In doing that, they’re recycling nutrients back into the soil, they’re getting rid of those things like dead bodies and dung. That prevents the spread of disease as well. So it’s incredibly important.”
In addition, “loads and loads of other animals eat flies”, Whitehouse says. “Spiders spring to mind, but lots of vertebrates as well. So birds and bats and amphibians and reptiles and fish all feed on either adult flies or their larvae. And they’re a really important food source for lots of these animals.”
There are more than 7,000 species of fly found in the UK, including bluebottles, greenbottles, hoverflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and crane flies (daddy longlegs). Houseflies (your classic chunky black fly; probably what comes to mind when most of us think of a fly) are generally considered the UK’s most common, although it is difficult to say for sure, because “weirdly, not enough people study flies”, says Erica McAlister, a fly expert and Natural History Museum curator.
Houseflies are important pollinators all over the world – in fact, McAlister says, a cousin of the common housefly is the dominant pollinator in the Arctic. “People are stuck on bees being the most important pollinators – and they are good, I’m not going to deny that,” she says. But while bee larvae don’t do anything except consume food until they have grown into their adult form, flies are “kicked out at birth”, and as larvae “they’re out there already helping clean up our environment”. And for anyone stuck on the idea that flies aren’t as cute as bees, she urges them to “go and look up a bee-fly”, which she says is “arguably one of the cutest species in the UK”.
Sure, a fly that has been “walking from faeces to food or decomposing food to another food” could be transporting pathogens, McAlister admits – but in “much the same way as if you handle money or if you go into a pub or if you shake hands with people”. As for flies “vomiting” on food, another complaint you often hear from fly-haters, it is not “vomiting” in the same way we think about humans throwing up, she says. “They’re not bringing up gut contents”, but releasing digestive enzymes on to food to break it down, “because they do not have biting mouth parts – they basically have a straw or a sponge with which they can suck up these ingredients.”
Instead of dwelling on flies’ negative associations, she says, “I try to get people to think of them as like, ‘It’s amazing, you’ve got these wild animals roaming around in front of your face.’” McAlister encourages people to learn about flies’ “fascinating” metamorphosis from larvae to adult fly, or the fact that they can land upside down, or that their eyes consist of thousands of facets that act like individual cameras. Every second, “they are processing thousands upon thousands of images”, she says.
It is all the more important to think positively about flies given that insects as a whole, including flies, are largely in decline. Although some migrant species are bucking the trend, the UK’s local species that rely on specific host plants or locations are “suffering badly” as the country becomes less accommodating to wildlife, McAlister says. “We need our politicians to really work at encompassing all of their decisions with an ecological framework,” she believes. And that’s in order to protect our own future, not just the future of flies: “If we die, insects won’t care,” McAlister says. “But if insects die, we are pretty much on a very downward spiral very quickly” – because of our reliance on their pollination services.
McAlister is not saying that we should all be living like Davies and Andrew. She is well aware that flies en masse can be a problem – but killing them, particularly in “a horrible and inhumane way” such as via fly tape, isn’t always the answer. Paradoxically, creating fly-friendly environments such as ponds in gardens, or even “a bucket on the veranda”, invites all kinds of wildlife, she says, including fly predators like birds and frogs, so flies actually get eaten and end up bothering humans less.
“There is an argument” for pest control when it comes to fly infestations, she says, but the most important thing to do is to “find out why that’s happened. Because the flies are an indicator that maybe something else is going on.” When fly infestations are reported, as they are every summer (currently, residents in Sileby, Leicestershire and Llanelli, Carmarthenshire are suffering along with those in West Heath), usually a link can be found “to some sort of waste event or some sort of environmental perturbation”, the curator says.
Davies and her neighbours think their fly problem is connected to a local recycling plant run by the company Tandom. In a statement sent to the Guardian, Tandom says it has “implemented a range of additional precautionary measures”, and is “working constructively with the Environment Agency, Cheshire East council and our independent pest control specialists”, but emphasised: “There is currently no evidence that flies are breeding on our site.” A spokesperson for the Environment Agency confirmed that it is in touch with Tandom, and says it has instructed the company “to take immediate steps to tackle the issue”, adding that it “will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action if required”.
Rather than automatically blaming flies when they bother us, we should look for potential human involvement, McAlister thinks. While we often think of house flies as dirty because they feed on faeces and are found in dirty areas, they actually “have to be the absolute opposite – they have to be exceptionally clean because they are sometimes in a bad environment”, she says. “But it’s our environment; we’re the ones who’ve made this environment. So, you know, we’re throwing stones at an indicator that something has maybe gone wrong.”
Perhaps it’s humans, then, not flies, who are the true pests.
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
Francesca Davies’s living room is absolutely teeming with flies. You can’t enter the contact centre worker’s home without a cluster of insects rising from the sofa or the floor to buzz around your face. Davies and her family live in West Heath, a suburb of the Cheshire town Congleton. Davies’s husband, Alex Andrew, a 29-year-old maintenance engineer, grew up in the market town and he used to think of West Heath as a desirable area, with its well-maintained houses and access to green space. When he and Davies were able to buy a new-build here in 2019 via a shared ownership scheme, they felt incredibly lucky. That is, until they moved in, and realised that every summer swarms of flies descend on their neighbourhood, an issue that is “getting worse”, Davies says.
At the moment, the 27-year-old swats flies out of her young daughters’ bedroom every night before she puts them to bed, and keeps doors and windows closed or covered with fly nets as much as possible. She and Andrew have even bought an industrial fly killer (like the ones often found in fish and chip shops) for their kitchen, as it is impossible to start cooking without attracting even more insects. The pair have become used to the sound of flies “getting zapped throughout the night”, Davies says.
The family have considered moving out of the area because of the flies, and say some of their former neighbours already have. But Davies is reluctant to give up on the house that is her “pride and joy”, she says. “It is a wonderful place to live. West Heath is so pretty, and everyone’s so lovely.”
Not to mention, “You would have to sell it in the winter,” Andrew points out, as prospective buyers would surely be put off by flies swarming around during a viewing. Instead, Davies is attempting to put pressure on the council and the Environment Agency to investigate by setting up a petition, which now has more than 1,000 signatures, asking local authorities “to take this matter seriously and to prioritise our community’s wellbeing”.
The petition has attracted a number of comments from other local people, including one who lives a 20-minute walk away from Andrew and Davies. “I’m shooing 40-plus flies out of my kitchen regularly throughout the day,” the commenter says. “It’s a constant battle.” Andrew says he has spoken to many neighbours who are struggling with the problem: one orders takeaways every day in the summer to avoid having to cook, while another has draped their newborn baby’s cot in a mosquito net. “They’ve all had enough,” Andrew and Davies’s neighbour Bryan Stahl says, when we walk over the road to his house, which the street’s residents generally consider to be the worst affected by the infestation.
Though it’s hard to believe as we swat flies away while we chat, today is a relatively mild day for flies, Stahl tell me, because it is breezier than it has been in recent weeks. At the height of the recent heatwave, the 54-year-old and his partner stayed inside, or in garden chairs under a gazebo walled with fly nets. Davies and Andrew have a similar structure for their garden, which they set up when their daughters want to use their paddling pool. Stahl, a higher level teaching assistant in a school, has spent about £500 on the gazebo and numerous fly screens, he thinks – and is considering forking out thousands more for permanent fly shutters. “It makes you feel like you’ve got a really dirty house,” he says.
Even though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone as anti-fly right now as the residents of West Heath, it’s not as if flies are popular with many people. Whether it’s Jeff Goldblum’s gruesome transformation into a fly in David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror film The Fly, or God sending swarms of flies as one of the 10 plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to persuade the Pharaoh to set the Israelites free in the Old Testament, the messaging is clear: flies are disgusting.
But could they be due a rebrand? After all, bees can be just as buzzy and annoying, and even sting us, but that doesn’t seem to have damaged their “cute” reputation, their likeness printed on T-shirts or tablecloths. Like bees, flies are pollinators and “essential to a healthy planet,” says Andrew Whitehouse, head of operations at the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife. In fact, he adds, there are some plants that are only pollinated by flies – including the cacao tree. “So if you didn’t have flies, you wouldn’t have chocolate.”
And though we might find it gross that flies are so attracted to faeces or rotting matter, it is actually a good thing that they are. “Fly larvae or maggots will eat lots of dead organic material,” Whitehouse says. “In doing that, they’re recycling nutrients back into the soil, they’re getting rid of those things like dead bodies and dung. That prevents the spread of disease as well. So it’s incredibly important.”
In addition, “loads and loads of other animals eat flies”, Whitehouse says. “Spiders spring to mind, but lots of vertebrates as well. So birds and bats and amphibians and reptiles and fish all feed on either adult flies or their larvae. And they’re a really important food source for lots of these animals.”
There are more than 7,000 species of fly found in the UK, including bluebottles, greenbottles, hoverflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and crane flies (daddy longlegs). Houseflies (your classic chunky black fly; probably what comes to mind when most of us think of a fly) are generally considered the UK’s most common, although it is difficult to say for sure, because “weirdly, not enough people study flies”, says Erica McAlister, a fly expert and Natural History Museum curator.
Houseflies are important pollinators all over the world – in fact, McAlister says, a cousin of the common housefly is the dominant pollinator in the Arctic. “People are stuck on bees being the most important pollinators – and they are good, I’m not going to deny that,” she says. But while bee larvae don’t do anything except consume food until they have grown into their adult form, flies are “kicked out at birth”, and as larvae “they’re out there already helping clean up our environment”. And for anyone stuck on the idea that flies aren’t as cute as bees, she urges them to “go and look up a bee-fly”, which she says is “arguably one of the cutest species in the UK”.
Sure, a fly that has been “walking from faeces to food or decomposing food to another food” could be transporting pathogens, McAlister admits – but in “much the same way as if you handle money or if you go into a pub or if you shake hands with people”. As for flies “vomiting” on food, another complaint you often hear from fly-haters, it is not “vomiting” in the same way we think about humans throwing up, she says. “They’re not bringing up gut contents”, but releasing digestive enzymes on to food to break it down, “because they do not have biting mouth parts – they basically have a straw or a sponge with which they can suck up these ingredients.”
Instead of dwelling on flies’ negative associations, she says, “I try to get people to think of them as like, ‘It’s amazing, you’ve got these wild animals roaming around in front of your face.’” McAlister encourages people to learn about flies’ “fascinating” metamorphosis from larvae to adult fly, or the fact that they can land upside down, or that their eyes consist of thousands of facets that act like individual cameras. Every second, “they are processing thousands upon thousands of images”, she says.
It is all the more important to think positively about flies given that insects as a whole, including flies, are largely in decline. Although some migrant species are bucking the trend, the UK’s local species that rely on specific host plants or locations are “suffering badly” as the country becomes less accommodating to wildlife, McAlister says. “We need our politicians to really work at encompassing all of their decisions with an ecological framework,” she believes. And that’s in order to protect our own future, not just the future of flies: “If we die, insects won’t care,” McAlister says. “But if insects die, we are pretty much on a very downward spiral very quickly” – because of our reliance on their pollination services.
McAlister is not saying that we should all be living like Davies and Andrew. She is well aware that flies en masse can be a problem – but killing them, particularly in “a horrible and inhumane way” such as via fly tape, isn’t always the answer. Paradoxically, creating fly-friendly environments such as ponds in gardens, or even “a bucket on the veranda”, invites all kinds of wildlife, she says, including fly predators like birds and frogs, so flies actually get eaten and end up bothering humans less.
“There is an argument” for pest control when it comes to fly infestations, she says, but the most important thing to do is to “find out why that’s happened. Because the flies are an indicator that maybe something else is going on.” When fly infestations are reported, as they are every summer (currently, residents in Sileby, Leicestershire and Llanelli, Carmarthenshire are suffering along with those in West Heath), usually a link can be found “to some sort of waste event or some sort of environmental perturbation”, the curator says.
Davies and her neighbours think their fly problem is connected to a local recycling plant run by the company Tandom. In a statement sent to the Guardian, Tandom says it has “implemented a range of additional precautionary measures”, and is “working constructively with the Environment Agency, Cheshire East council and our independent pest control specialists”, but emphasised: “There is currently no evidence that flies are breeding on our site.” A spokesperson for the Environment Agency confirmed that it is in touch with Tandom, and says it has instructed the company “to take immediate steps to tackle the issue”, adding that it “will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action if required”.
Rather than automatically blaming flies when they bother us, we should look for potential human involvement, McAlister thinks. While we often think of house flies as dirty because they feed on faeces and are found in dirty areas, they actually “have to be the absolute opposite – they have to be exceptionally clean because they are sometimes in a bad environment”, she says. “But it’s our environment; we’re the ones who’ve made this environment. So, you know, we’re throwing stones at an indicator that something has maybe gone wrong.”
Perhaps it’s humans, then, not flies, who are the true pests.
Read the full story at The Guardian ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- From Leicestershire to Carmarthenshire, neighbourhoods are struggling with wave after wave of houseflies.
- Why are they suffering while others are spared?
- And is there no…