© AAA Wildlife Control

As human society grows, animal habitat goes, and our homes are not just our own castles anymore. Looking for a place to raise their families, industrious raccoons, squirrels, and other small creatures gnaw and claw their way into roofs, attics, basements, vent pipes, and chimneys. And when your organization gets calls for help from homeowners who are nervous and frustrated, you are probably just as frustrated by your limited options for truly humane wildlife removal. But thanks to a pioneering company in Canada, a new approach—one that is both compassionate and effective—is on the horizon in the United States.

They ask for so little: shelter from the elements, sustenance for their babies, a soft spot for nesting and nursing. The raccoons, squirrels, skunks, and other wild animals who find their way into the cracks and crevices of our abodes are only doing what their human counterparts have always done: carving out a place in the landscape that they can call home.

© AAA Wildlife Control Twenty-five years after successfully preparing a baby raccoon named Mandy for a life in the wild, Brad Gates is still helping her kind—but on a much larger scale.

There’s perfect logic to it, from a critter’s perspective. In the same spots where squirrels crawl into roof vents and raccoons climb down chimneys, these animals’ ancestors once took up residence in the cavities of aging trees that have long since been chopped down and underground burrows that are now trapped under asphalt.

Nothing if not resourceful, these wild urban residents have managed to adapt to a changing world and find the next best thing to natural habitat: manmade structures that provide all the insulation and protection they need to raise growing families.

© John Hadidian/HSUS With 45 employees and five locations around Canada, the humane-oriented company, AAA Wildlife Control, removes animals from homes and releases them on site after making repairs that will prevent reentry by the likes of this raccoon, who’d been nesting in a residential chimney.

Rather than admire their ingenuity, however, some members of our society want only to evict them from their environs in whatever way possible. On the borders of ever-shrinking woodlands and expanding urban landscapes lies an imaginary barrier created by a culture that, somewhere between the dawn of civilization and the twilight of industrialization, has all but lost its connection to the natural world. In an age when a snake sunning himself peacefully in the garden is often perceived as a grave threat, it’s no surprise that animals who’ve penetrated the walls of our homes seem even more forbidding.

But all they are doing is looking for a home of their own. “Wild animals are adjusting to the conditions, opportunities and resources we provide them, intentionally or not,” says John Hadidian, director of The HSUS’s urban wildlife program. “They don’t know that a hole leading into an attic takes them into a place where they are not welcomed.Their populations are growing and expanding, too, and they will use all the resources available to them in response to that growth.”

Worldwide, human population growth shows no signs of slowing, with potentially dire consequences for all species. According to United Nations projections, the everincreasing expansion of urban populations and territories means that, in just a few years, more people will live in urban areas than in rural ones for the first time in human history.

As our kind further encroaches on lands once ruled by furred and winged inhabitants, a whole industry has sprouted around manmade fears of the unknown and the misunderstood. Buoyed by a lack of consumer education about real alternatives, the business of “nuisance” wildlife control is booming. It’s a lucrative game—one that experts estimate causes the unnecessary deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of wild animals each year—and it remains largely unregulated. Federal and state agencies lack the resources, and apparently often the interest, to address the problem themselves. And at the local level, public and private animal care and control agencies are often too burdened with domestic animal issues—and even rehabilitation of injured and orphaned wild animals brought to their doorsteps—to focus on the clawed and pawed residents of suburban and urban attics and basements.

The effect, says Hadidian, has essentially been a “yielding of the field” of wildlife control to private operators. Although no national figures are available, the growth of the “nuisance” wildlife control industry has been dramatic. The rapid rise of one business may be due, in part, to the decline of another: the majority of operators still active today probably came from the recreational and commercial fur trades following a reduction in fur prices. Understanding the extent of the problem is as easy as opening the Yellow Pages in any city, looking in the pest control section, and counting the large number of companies now advertising wildlife removal services.

Specialists in trapping but largely ignorant of the other skills needed to make wildlife control a professional avocation, many practitioners advocate inhumane and inappropriate methods for resolving conflicts. A striking example is the recommendation by some operators that acetone, or nail polish remover, be injected into the thoracic cavities of trapped animals to “dispatch” them.

Trade magazines for the industry highlight the successes of wildlife trappers or wildlife control operators who kill every animal they trap—often inhumanely. The author of one article recommended sealing animals in air-tight containers until they suffocate—on the grounds that it’s cheap and blood-free. In the same piece, the trapper assured readers that his suggested shooting method would “make short handiwork of even the toughest of raccoons.”

Yet customers appear to receive a different story, one that makes the trapper’s services sound humane by comparison: “Often times I will be as vague as possible and simply say that if I am successful, anything that is trapped will be ‘relocated,’ ” he wrote in a description of his interactions with clients. “Details are only furnished if necessary and are presented in a very professional manner.”

Many shelter workers know the frustration of navigating the minefields of the private wildlife control industry. Before launching a humane wildlife control division for the Wisconsin Humane Society last year, Scott Diehl and his colleagues at the shelter’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center felt forced to refer homeowners to independent operators. Though he screened companies by surveying their practices and encouraged callers to request humane treatment from the businesses they hired, he still wasn’t comfortable with his referrals. “We completely lost any control over what happened to the animal at that point,” he says.

Nationwide, homeowners searching for humane solutions to wildlife problems have few places to turn. Some rent traps from public and private animal care and control agencies and then relocate the offending animal. Others call animal care and control officers who perform the duty themselves as part of the services offered by their municipalities. But a good number leave the job in the hands of private operators whose sole goal, in many cases, is profit. Oddly, though Americans spend billions of dollars each year on bird feeders, food, and other items that enhance their enjoyment of wild animals near their homes, they also spend millions, if not billions, to evict those who’ve dared to cross the invisible line into human territory. Annual sales generated by the largest wildlife control company in the U.S. have reportedly exceeded $20 million.

© AAA Wildlife Control Skunks often make their dens under decks, sheds, porches, and other areas that lack solid foundations. But like other wild animals, they have secondary nesting sites on reserve if the preferred ones are endangered, a biological phenomenon that helps make the on-site release techniques developed by AAA Wildlife Control so successful.

In a country with seemingly endless options for everything from cars to toothpaste, humane wildlife removal services exist in only a handful of communities. The common method of relocating an animal to another territory is far from the humane solution it is often touted to be. Animals plucked out of their known home ranges and plunked down miles away have a slim chance of survival; they have to compete for available resources with other animals who already know the lay of the land. As animal control officer Lori Thiele tells citizens in her College Park, Maryland, jurisdiction, “What if I took you right now and sent you over to Chicago and put you down, and you didn’t have any money and all you had was the clothes you were wearing and you didn’t know where to stay? … That’s how the animals feel when you move them. They get beat up by thugs and mugged on the corner.”

Even more importantly to the homeowner, the trap-and-removal method is not a permanent solution on its own; unsealed entryways remain an open invitation to newcomers seeking refuge, and random trapping doesn’t even ensure that the “target” animal who’s causing the problem is the one who’s actually being removed. But Thiele used to do it anyway at times; like Diehl, she felt forced into handling wildlife issues in ways she knew were far from ideal, sometimes removing animals from the homes of angry citizens who threatened to call the mayor if she didn’t fulfill their requests.

“Now as I’ve learned a lot more and as I know that there are different techniques and different ways to deal with this stuff,” says Thiele, “I mostly try to educate people and talk them out of trapping and removal.”

Moving animals from place to place not only disorients the animals but can also contribute to the spread of disease among species; viruses such as parvo and distemper, which could have been contained to one community, will jump at the chance to travel to another. And the practice of trapping and relocating risks separating mothers from their young and leaving the babies behind to die unnecessarily.

“Loaning or renting of traps is something that we would like to see diminished or eliminated,” says Hadidian, “because we don’t know what people do with the animals after they trap them. We don’t know where those animals go. We don’t know whether they’re separating mothers from litters; very often they are. And there are other solutions to dealing with these conflicts that are biologically appropriate, sound, reasonable, and humane.”

Studies and national surveys show that, given the option, most people would choose more compassionate alternatives to traditional trapping methods—and almost half would even pay a higher price to ensure humane treatment of animals.

Until recently, those alternatives were largely unheard of in this country. But up in Canada, they began brewing in the mind of a young wildlife lover and entrepreneur named Brad Gates 25 years ago.

Gates was a summer away from heading off to college when he experienced something that would one day lead him to pioneer new methods for animal removal: the joys of surrogate raccoon fatherhood. After seeing an article in the local paper about a wildlife company in search of adoptive homes for a litter of orphaned raccoons, Gates decided to give it a try.

He named his baby Mandy, and, throughout that summer, taught the raccoon to do raccoon-like things: foraging in garbage cans was a favorite activity. It was 1979, and Gates would soon be heading out on his own himself, so he did everything he could to acclimate Mandy to a life in the urban wilds before leaving.

Two years went by, and one night upon coming home and pulling into the driveway, Gates saw a pair of raccoon eyes in the glare of his headlights. Wondering if Mandy had come back to see him, he unleashed his old familiar whistle call, and, just as she had done as a baby, Mandy responded by running over, crawling up Gates’s pant leg, and landing on his shoulder.

That night, as Gates emptied his whole refrigerator to make a feast for Mandy, he decided that helping her kind was going to be his life’s mission. During college he had already worked for a wildlife business and learned “how not to run a removal company,” he says. Money was what mattered most to the owners of the business; respect for animals and customers was not a priority.

© AAA Wildlife Control AAA Wildlife Control vice president Peter Nolan cradles the youngest skunk he’s ever held in his 18 years with the company. This baby and his siblings will soon be reunited with their mother, after Nolan secures the perimeter of the shed the family has been nesting under.

Since then Gates has built a compassionate company so successful that all the others in the Toronto area have tried to mimic it in some way. With five locations, 45 employees, 30 trucks, and about 600 calls a day, AAA Wildlife is the largest wildlife control operation in Canada. And the techniques Gates has developed—involving releasing animals on site and excluding their reentry through structural repairs and additions—works so well that he is able to offer one- to ten-year guarantees on his work.

Because the methods are developed with the habits of individual species in mind, they are extremely successful. To understand how and why they work, it’s necessary to know that when raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and other species look for a safe place to have babies, they scope out more than one potential nesting site. That way, if a nest is discovered by a predator or becomes too dangerous, the mother has other places to fall back on.

In a presentation last April to an HSUS Animal Care Expo audience of interested shelters, animal care and control agencies, and animal welfare groups, Gates showed videos of his vice president of 18 years, Peter Nolan, crawling into the guts of houses and implementing the company’s four-step approach: inspection, animal removal, animalproofing, and release.

Nolan’s skill and attention to detail shine through even on screen: all his movements are swift but exacting as he locates nests, picks up tiny babies with gloved hands, and places his temporary captives in a canvas bag. He is so quiet and careful that the animals, though scared, don’t vocalize or scatter.

Once out of the tight space, Nolan places babies as close to the entry holes as possible, either in jugs on the roof or heated “release” boxes on the ground.

In an ideal situation, moms are captured with their babies. But more often than not, they escape through their entry holes and out of the building, then hover quietly in the shadows until they feel safe enough to come out and begin retrieving their babies from the insulated containers.

“What we need to do with the babies when we don’t have their mother is we need to put them as close to the point of entry on the house as we can get them because she’s going to think that the babies are still in the attic,” says Gates. “She doesn’t know that we’ve collected them; she just thinks, ‘I’ve got to get back into the attic to get out my babies.’ They’re very maternal— skunks, raccoons, and squirrels. They want their babies back and will do anything to get them back. So we put them in this release box near the entry hole. After the entry holes and problem spots have been screened she will return to collect and relocate her offspring and move them to an alternate den site, one by one.”

© AAA Wildlife Control When it’s not possible to trap a mother along with her babies and place them outside together, AAA technicians put babies in a container near the point of entry to the original den. That way, when a mama squirrel or skunk tries to reenter home through her normal access route, she’ll find her babies at the now sealed “doorway” and carry them one by one to an alternate nesting site.

“We preserve the family unit,” Gates says. “In every situation, we are very careful to identify where the den may be, collect all the babies that are present, and then reunite the family on the outside once the entry hole has been closed.”

Acompassionate man who has studied the habits of wild animals in unlikely places for more than two decades, Gates has been known to stop traffic to help mother animals reach their alternate nesting sites. He has trained himself to think like an animal, picking up tidbits of knowledge that only experience can glean.

He knows, for instance, that babies scare easily and might scatter if they’re mobile enough, so before you start gathering them, you have to do a headcount. He knows that raccoon hair surrounding a hole doesn’t necessarily mean there are raccoons inside; there’s a chance you could also be dealing with a family of squirrels who’ve moved into someone else’s old den site. And he knows that a squirrel who’s flicking her tail and vocalizing frantically near a recently closed entry hole in the roof isn’t doing her J. Lo impression; she’s alarmed that she’s been separated from babies who were overlooked during an initial attic inspection, and she needs a technician to conduct another search and retrieve the rest of her family.

He also knows what it takes to run an efficient and economically viable operation. Admired as much for his business acumen as for his humane sensibilities, Gates has been working with The HSUS to promote his release-on-site and exclusion concepts to U.S. organizations— not just because it’s humane, not just because it’s effective, but because it can actually be done. And it can be done in a way that’s not just self-sustaining but profitable enough to help support other worthy endeavors.

That’s key to making this model of urban wildlife control work in local communities, says Hadidian. “Like everything else in this country, it could be the greatest concept, it could be theoretically sound, it could be morally unimpeachable. But if it doesn’t make sense economically, it’s not going anywhere,” he says. “This makes sense economically. … It’s one of the most viable concepts I’ve seen come along.”

It’s not hard to see the potential: A typical job involving animal removal and the closing of one entry point takes AAA Wildlife 60 to 90 minutes and earns the company about $300 in Canadian currency (or about $240 American). By charging such fees to homeowners for animal removal and animal- proofing repairs, local nonprofits can make enough money to support their wildlife rehabilitation efforts, says Hadidian.

Humane problem-solving makes sense economically to the average homeowner as well. Based on her experiences with customers, Laura Niremberg of the Wildlife Orphanage in Chesterton, Indiana, isn’t surprised by the survey results indicating that most people want to do the right thing but are unaware of their options—and unaware of the measures they could have taken to prevent problems in the first place.

“We’ve had people spend more money removing skunks than it costs them to secure the entire perimeter of their deck through us,” says Niremberg, who, together with her husband, underwent training at AAA Wildlife last year. “That’s what one guy said to me: ‘Oh my God, $600 sounds like a lot, but I paid more to have those animals killed.’ That’s despicable. That needs to end.”

Even if its sole benefit were humane alleviation of conflicts between humans and wild animals, a wildlife assistance program like Good Neighbors at the Wisconsin Humane Society could more than justify its own existence in the minds of forward-thinking animal protectionists. But because of its fee-for-service structure, it also has the potential to help even more animals— the 5,000 sick, injured, and orphaned critters who come each year to the shelter’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

“It’s not legal to charge for wildlife rehabilitation services, and unfortunately, it’s difficult to convey to the public the expense involved in running a rehab center,” Diehl says. “You can generate donations, but [donors] don’t really have a full understanding of how much it costs to do surgery on an eagle or something like that. … So we thought this was an entrepreneurial opportunity to not only serve the animals and the public who are looking to us for help and expertise, but we could possibly generate some income at the same time.”

Having run the shelter’s wildlife rehabilitation center with his wife for the last 21 years, Diehl already had ample expertise. But healthy critters nesting in eaves and attics present different challenges than do sick, injured, and orphaned animals, he says. And starting an initiative like Good Neighbors requires an intensive examination of area demographics, future personnel and equipment costs, competitor practices and prices, and effective marketing strategies.

That’s why the hands-on training and business advice that AAA Wildlife provides to nonprofit and government agencies is critical to the success of a new program, says Diehl, who trained with Gates and his staff before launching Good Neighbors last year. A detailed sample business plan, created by The HSUS and modeled after the AAA philosophy, can help other organizations get started on a similar venture.

Because of its moneymaking potential, Diehl thought he would have to set up Good Neighbors as a private entity. But he was able to keep it under the umbrella of the Wisconsin Humane Society after lawyers determined that the services matched the organization’s mission and goals. Of the 15,000 to 20,000 wildlife-related calls made to the shelter each year, many already involved requests for assistance in removing or excluding animals from homes.

Though he receives two or three calls a day about wild animals who’ve scratched their way into people’s domains, Diehl knows that he himself is just barely scratching the surface. Ninety percent of those who request free estimates end up contracting for his services, a good sign that he may soon be able to turn a profit and hire another fulltime staffer to do the job.

As the business increases, Diehl is already making a difference for animals and their unwitting human housemates in the Milwaukee area. One of his clients, who’d already paid another company to remove gray squirrels from her attic, called Diehl when she began experiencing the problem again. “They’d set a trap in the yard and on the house, and they caught eight squirrels less than a year ago and relocated or destroyed them at their discretion— because that’s legal in this state,” says Diehl.

It’s no surprise to Diehl that less than a year later, more squirrels moved in. “So we went in and put in very heavy mesh—which Brad has tested over 20 years and shown to be more than adequate to keep squirrels and raccoons out—and put it over one of those vents on one side of the house,” says Diehl. “And then on the side that they were coming and going, we put a one-way door in that lets the squirrels leave but not get back in.”

It wasn’t breeding season, but Diehl still made sure there were no babies before doing any repair work. Once he was certain the squirrels were gone, he removed the one-way door and put a final heavy mesh safeguard in place. Then he gave the customer a oneyear guarantee on the work.

“We just love the fact that it’s biologically sound,” says Diehl. “These very common, even abundant, species are always going to be around us. Their mere presence is not the problem. … This is a model for handling animals that we’d love to see duplicated over and over again and really become the standard for how we deal with these kinds of urban wildlife problems.”

Starting a release-on-site removal service has another important, though less direct, economic benefit for rehabilitation centers and shelters. Because the methods involved help keep mothers and babies together, humane wildlife removal doesn’t contribute to the influx of orphans in need of rehabilitation.

© John Hadidian/HSUS After removing a raccoon from a chimney, Peter Nolan and Brad Gates transfer her to a cage and then to a heated release box, where she can rest and de-stress with her babies while the men affix a cap to the chimney to prevent reentry.

Sometimes the concept of releasing animals right outside the house they’ve just been occupying is a tough sell to people already indoctrinated in the not-in-my-backyard approach to wildlife problems, says Gates. “You get the customer that has lost a lot of sleep, has seen insulation and shingles on the ground in their backyard and their initial response is, ‘You know, I don’t care what you have to do to these animals; just get them out of the house.’ And then we explain, ‘Well, we’re going to do it humanely,’ and they reiterate they don’t care.”

The antidote to that attitude, says Gates, is simple enough: Let the animals make their own case. “We make it a point on the way back down [from the attic] with the babies to stop and show them what they had in their attic, and baby raccoons are just adorable. I have yet to meet a person that didn’t think so. And the next words that they utter after seeing the baby raccoons is, ‘You’re not going to hurt them, are you?’”

Most people in the U.S. have no idea what really happens to animals after private wildlife control companies remove them, says Thiele, who recently underwent five days of training with Gates and his staff. And because of all the misinformation perpetuated about wild animals in urban environments, they tend to think everything is an emergency. The squirrel in the attic and the skunk under the shed loom larger than life in the minds of those who’ve never encountered animal squatters.

That’s why in her job as an ACO, Thiele is now focusing on instilling more patience in people. Most of the calls she receives about wild animals— whether about a raccoon in the house or a fox under the shed— are not urgent. Once a mother has finished raising her young, she will usually leave the nesting spot. “So I have managed to talk them all into just waiting a little bit until the babies leave,” she says. “And then we can revisit it and screen [the opening] in so that they don’t have to call me back next year.”

While still in the process of gathering wildlife removal equipment such as mesh screening, head lamps, masks, and ladders, Thiele is also trying to figure out how to squeeze wildlife jobs into her daily routine of animal care and control for the city of College Park. But because she receives so many calls about wild animals anyway, she wants to at least begin the transition to more humane, effective practices. Besides, after climbing around in attics “like a monkey,” poking around laundry vents and chimneys, and learning to use a power drill during her training in Canada, Thiele can’t wait to do more.

“I’m more willing to try to go the extra mile to get up there and look around—because it’s so fun to find the babies,” she says. “It’s just like a treasure hunt. You’re looking all over and then you start picking them up and putting them in the bag, and that gets the mom going and primes her for getting [herself] out of there. And it all works out really well.”

So well, in fact, that some graduates of AAA Wildlife training have seen their business more than triple since implementing the practices developed by Gates. Laura and Ken Niremberg’s revenues jumped by 300 percent in the year following the training—and climbed even higher during the first few months of 2005.

“We’re more knowledgeable,” explains Laura Niremberg. “And we’re better able to sell it to people because I have more knowledge about it. Brad is wonderful. His guidance was tremendous, and he still is one of the most helpful, generous souls on the planet.”

Despite the organization’s name, the Wildlife Orphanage is moving away from rehabilitation and trying to focus exclusively on homeowner assistance and education. “We can change perceptions of people better this way,” says Niremberg. “Just giving them a place to dump babies and not have a one-on-one where you get to educate them wasn’t working. And we were bankrupting ourselves.”

Their humane removal services give the Nirembergs an opportunity to “convert” people in a tangible way, she says. One job last spring involved a family of critters who’d taken up residence in the stone fireplace of an elderly woman who is looked after by a fleet of neighbors. After hearing that the woman’s fireplace would have to be cut up during a daylong job, the neighbors banded together and decided instead to wait five or six weeks until the babies were big enough to leave. “And then we’d come back and cap the chimney,” says Niremberg. “So now we’ve got the whole neighborhood watch group following these babies around and giving them names. They’re all invested in this. These are animals that weren’t personalized before. And by doing this, I really do believe that this changes more perceptions than any of the other work I’ve ever done.”

In May, after a cabin owner had trapped a mother raccoon, the Nirembergs helped the man by removing the baby orphans from his walls and wildlife-proofing his entire home—an expensive proposition for any homeowner. “The man had killed the mother because [based on the recommendations of] every place he’d called, that’s all he knew to do,” says Niremberg. “And he felt terrible about it. So when he wrote the check for 1,200 bucks, he didn’t even flinch because he felt so bad. And he said, ‘My God, why do more people not know about this?’ ”