Stephen Vantassel interviews  Jason McDonald Received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Political Science, focused on economic policy in Eastern Europe in 1992. Upon deciding not to be a professor, Dr. McDonald pursued a career in technology journalism working at a number of San Francisco Bay Area start ups, ranging from Omnibus, Computer Currents, and MW Media. He also wrote freelance for many years with articles appearing in trade journals and press such as EE Times, Dr. Dobb’s, and Software Development Forum. In 1995, he left MW Media and was one of the co-founders of eg3.com. Jason was Senior Editor for content at eg3.com fron 1994 to 2009, responsible for website coverage (keywords), the monthly newsletter, and the series of Insiders’ Guides on topics from RTOS to FPGAs. In 2009, Jason founded the JM Internet Group to bring SEO, AdWords, and Social Media Marketing to a larger community.

In an epic 2 hour podcast Chris Ernst the Director Of Brand Strategy At Catcmaster give you an in-depth look at Brand and Branding. What branding is and what it isn’t how do you implement a brand strategy for your pest control business.

Hi, everyone, Stephen Vantassel here living the wildlife for the Pest Geek podcast. Thanks for listening today. Hey, I wanted to talk about those of you who are inventors.

Yes, there are a lot of wildlife control operators who are tinkerers. They like to toy around with things and manipulate things to make things better. Their idea people, it’s one of the fascinating aspects of the wildlife control industry. I suspect it also occurs in the pest control industry. But you also have major corporations behind the production of new items in the pest control industry. So I think some of that sort of kind of tamped down some of that ingenuity. But on the wildlife control field, which I certainly know more about, we don’t have those multi-million up to billion-dollar companies to have, you know, trained engineers developing materials. So we’ve had to develop stuff on our own. And the challenge, of course, is, is that wildlife are complex creatures in the sense that they do things differently in different environments. And plus, the mobility that they have requires equipment and tools that often can’t be cookie-cutter in approach.

Utilizing online training with Certified Training Institute Pesticide CEU Continuing Education Courses with online continuing education and exam prep for agricultural and structural pest control.  CTI offers Certification Exam Prep with online HD video exam prep for agricultural and structural pest these exam prep programs are available 24/7 from any internet capable device so you can study on your own time and they offer Agricultural Worker Safety Training (WPS) with any establishments involved in growing, producing, or maintaining for sale agricultural plants. Businesses that stay updated on Worker Protection Training help their workers and handlers reduce the risk of pesticide poisoning to help your business operation to run smoothly with a reduced risk of liability lawsuits, avoid federal civil penalties.

So, I mean, I was thinking about that answer and I thought, so here is my solutions. Let me kind of put them out. I like 4 points. Basically, why that happens in the first reason is ignorance. I mean, sometimes PCO doesn’t understand that. They’re not following the laws of their state. Let me give an illustration of that. So it would be Massachusetts where I used to do some wildlife control work. A PTO would a lot of them would say, well, I’m doing pest control. That raccoon is a pest. So I’m licensed by the Department of Agriculture to do pest control and I have a vertebrate category. Some states even have a vertebrate category for pest control. That’s a vertebrate. So let me go take care of it. Got it. Without realizing that the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife is the governing authority over wildlife. The Department of AG is the governing authority over pesticides. So pesticides refers to the tool where the Department of Fish and Wildlife has authority over the creature. So this is where it goes. So that’s a confusion. There’s actually a letter sent out from the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife that said that all to all the PCOS basically, look, if you’re doing wildlife control work.

And by the way, mice and rats are not considered wildlife. Everybody. They’re not even and they’re not they’re a non-native species. Same way with pigeons and the house sparrows and starlings. Yeah, they’re vertebrates, but they’re not wildlife life because they’re not native to the  United States. So that’s why pesticides can be used on those things. Those animals and not necessarily a raccoon per say, OK. But in any event, the divisions of fisheries, while I’ve sent a letter out thereby said, look, you know if you’re doing wildlife control, you’re doing a woodchuck. You’ve got to have a wildlife control operator’s license, period. So that it’s probably the first reason. And I think that’s becoming less of an excuse now as the industry is beginning to grow. And so then we kind of have to move on to other reasons why PCOS are doing wildlife control work illegally. I mean, those that are obviously not all of them are. And I think some of it’s maybe a misunderstanding. Sometimes a PCL will look at a label mate and they’ve been pounded all the time. The label is the law label is the law label

And they read this label and it says this ignite a gas cartridge for use against woodchucks. And they’re like, that’s the law. I’m a PCO. I have the ability to use this pesticide on a woodchuck. This is a woodchuck. I’m using it. Well, that’s true. All that’s true. But they don’t understand that the Department of Agriculture often doesn’t have authority over that woodchuck. It has authority over the pesticide. You still have to have another license to control the woodchuck. Got it. So that was you’d have to have the license to control the woodchuck. Then you would have to have the license to use a pesticide to control that woodchuck.

Because you could control the woodchuck with a trap or a shooting which would be under fish while the division of Fisheries and Wildlife. So that’s so that’s part of the misunderstanding that can occur. Now, understand, some states there are certain wild day animals that are under the Department of Agriculture’s authority or like in my state, for instance, we have animals that aren’t even regulated at all, like Khayat Khayat. So it’s basically a long-legged rat.

You can drive into Montana tomorrow. No license, no nothing. Shoot Chi-Lites all day long. That’s no, it’s it’s a rat. There’s unrestricted.

And today we’re going to be discussing why you should be doing YouTube videos and having a YouTube channel as a pest control professional. In this day and age, the media win. And there’s more people doing searches for things like pest control and lawn care and how to solve a lot of these problems and information on YouTube than there are on Google. And the reason why is this is a visual business and people are not going to read a 3000 word blog to try to either find a company or solve a problem. 

Here is my interview with Richard Shevelow.   His details are below.  His SkyHawk Kiwi is a cellular-based trap monitoring device to notify WCOs and PCOs when their traps have been successful in capturing something. 

Rich Shevelow

CEO

c: (508) 954-4989 | o: (508) 866-1137

PICA Manufacturing Solutions & Product Development

4 Ash Street

Extension, Derry, NH 03038

picamfg.com | picapd.com

Stephen M. Vantassel,

CWCP, ACE

Wildlife Control

Consultant, LLC

http://wildlifecontrolconsultant.com

http://kingsdivinity.academia.edu/StephenMVantassel

Helping people resolve

conflicts with wildlife through teaching, training, writing, and research

I Wanted to talk today about Trap molestation. He has kind of a strange phrase, to be sure, but what I’m referring to is when your traps just are being disturbed. So because that could really be a significant problem for people in wildlife control, because if you’re traps or not. Working then you’re not going to be catching the animals that you had. Sure, I can actually be making money on time. Is money in your loss if you’re spending more time on site?

So a job that may have to do with taking five days is now covering two weekends. And, you know, it just goes on and on and on. The customer suffer more damage, it can be harder for you to set up elsewhere. So when your traps are molested, the traps were bothered when your traps were disturbed. It can be a significant hassle for your business and your client as well. So this is a reality that we have to accept.

It’s certainly something that people in the pest control world have to struggle with as well. In terms of bait stations not being they not being left alone or maybe their glueboards are being moved around. That could certainly happen in kitchens and in warehouses and that sort of thing.

Wildlife Control Consultant, LLC367 Castle Ridge Dr.Lewistown, MT 59457

https://wildlifecontrolconsultant.com/

You have a skunk problem and it sprayed in or around the home how to get rid off skunk smell In in house, Well, as you all know, skunks have incredibly powerful musk. And there’s been some interesting research that’s been done the last, oh, probably 40 or 50 years now. That’s kind of clarified some things about skunk essence that you may not have known. One of the things we’ve learned, of course, is that skunk odor can be smelled at 10 parts per billion. That’s with a B billion. So it’s an amazing, amazingly powerful thing. So if your client is complaining of skunk, go there. You have to evaluate the intensity of that. And that’s very difficult to do because they could smell a skunk that was hit by a car up to a mile away. So it intensity is going to be important to see if this person just has a really good Swiffer or is it really something that they’re handling on their property or is it something next door and you’ll game this over experience? Generally, if people are saying, you know, they’re having trouble breathing and they’re coughing and their eyes are watering and they can’t stand it. Neighbors, people that meet them are smelling their clothes, then, yeah, it’s probably on their property. Now, it’s important to understand about skunk essence that it doesn’t leak from the skunk just because he walks by. It’s not like Pepe Lupu probably mentioned that in an earlier podcast. So. They spray when they feel threatened or when they when they’re sick.

So this week, I want to talk about domicile damage. So domicile damage would be a case where a skunk or a family of skunks is living underneath a deck or a porch in that sort of thing. So how do you going to work that out? Well, first of all, let’s talk about a couple things. Your client will often call you because they’ve had a smell and understand that skunks don’t normally spray unless there’s something is threatening them or they’re ill. So it’s country. Pepe Lupu. People think that if they don’t smell anything, they don’t have a skunk. And that’s simply not true. You can have skunks underneath your deck or underneath the shed in people that smell anything because skunks don’t like the odor anymore than most humans do. So it’s really kind of a red herring. But typically what happens is people begin to know that they have skunks on their property because their dog got sprayed. They smelled something, because when you’re dealing with juveniles, at times, juveniles are much more trigger happy. So when someone’s walking on the deck, this juvenile may be scared and just squirts off a little bit and then people are smelling something and then they realize, well, I’ve got something on my property. Otherwise, you’re dealing with a situation where people are sometimes we’ll see them in, they’ll see a skunk go underneath their deck and they’re like, what is this half moon devitt underneath my deck for? So that is. That would be an example of domiciled domicile damage. So. How do you go about controlling, controlling that? Well, you have a couple of options that are effective. Let’s talk about those. The first option, of course, would be simply trap and remove. So how would you go about doing that?

Wildlife Control Consultant, LLC367 Castle Ridge Dr.Lewistown, MT 59457-8601

402-489-1042 MTN Time

https://wildlifecontrolconsultant.com/