How can you get rid of clothes moths? The common clothes moth: 'It is possible to defeat moths. You could, for instance, burn your house down.' Photograph: Alamy When you look at the size of a clothes moth -- and sometimes I look at the size of a clothes moth five times a day prior to mashing it violently against a wall/carpet/treasured coat -- it seems extraordinary how useless the human race is at killing this most destructive of pests. Without difficulty, people wipe out badgers, cats, other human beings. How hard can it be to kill a scrap of animated dust that lives on old sweat and cardigans? True, weaponry has advanced, a little, since I was first infested. Two decades ago, when a soft Nicole Farhi cardigan emerged for its first outing with ragged holes already dotting the moth-favoured breast region, the best on offer was mothballs and those bits of amusingly-shaped cedar that are as effective at combating moths as, say, snowballs would be at wiping out the Taliban. That I followed, scrupulously, the advice at the time -- discard the principal moth victims, wash out the drawers, launder any survivors, then ceremonially re-inter what remained with mothballs, lavender and pricey bits of cedar -- merely ensured every wardrobe would be turned, in time, into a woollens' charnel house. Even tiny hand-knitted dolls' cardigans that had survived decades in Yorkshire were eaten after a few months on the backs of my daughter's moth-infested bears. Another purge brought