Ask And You Shall Receive

My father once told me to be careful of what you ask for in life; you may accidentally receive it. I will spend a lot of time over the coming months trapping and relocating nuisance animals, such as raccoon, opossum, skunks, rats, mice and coyotes from property in the Farmington/Farmington Hills and surrounding areas.

Since I started writing trapping stories I have received a lot of questions on trapping. One question in particular, I get asked the most relates to how I started trapping nuisance animals. The following is the story of how Trapper Ron came into existence, I hope you enjoy it.
It all started about ten years ago in the driveway of my home in the City of Farmington. It was about 9:00 p.m. and my wife and I were attempting to remove the window sticker off of our brand new full sized van we had just purchased.

I was standing on the passenger side with the door open scrapping the sticker off when two skunks appeared at my feet from under the van. I was in shock and feared moving. The skunks walked casually past my feet towards the backyard and squeezed under the fence. I slowly peeked around the corner of my house and watched them crawl under my deck.
My wife, Kathy, insisted that I get rid if them for obvious reasons. I didn’t have a clue what to do, so I called the city for help. They said that as long as the animals were outside the home, they could not do anything. However, they did have a couple of live traps I could use, if I wanted to trap it myself.

I have hunted and fished my whole life and I thought that trapping should be easy enough, so I went to the police station to borrow a trap. At the station, I talked with an officer while waiting for a trap to be brought out from a back storage room. He asked what I was trapping and I told him my story about the skunks. I asked him what should I do with any skunks I trap;
He just laughed and said, “Sounds like skunk fricassee to me”. I replied, “You mean I can shoot it once I trap it”. The officer looked at me with a very concerned expression and said,
“No, you cannot shoot it, city ordinance does not allow some to set off a fire arm within the city”.
After a second or two I asked, “Well, can I shoot it with my bow?”.
The officer looked at me with a devilish grin and walked away. I took that to mean that I have a viable alternative, until I looked at the trap. The metal wiring of the trap was too tight to shoot it with a bow and arrow so I dismissed this option altogether.

Later that evening, I set up the live trap in the driveway near the area of my deck where the skunks had entered the night before. I didn’t know what to bait the trap with so I looked in the refrigerator. The only thing I could see that might work was hot dogs. I grabbed a couple and threw them into the trap.

Early the next morning, I looked out my kitchen window and to my surprise there was a very large skunk inside the live trap. My chest pumped up as I strutted down the hall to brag to my wife who was still sleeping.

Kathy was very happy but wondered how and where I was going to get rid of it. The reality of this finally sank in as I drank a cup of coffee and watched the skunk from the safety of my kitchen.

Many questions were running through my head; would it spray me, how far could it spray, how was I to get close to the cage, never mind opening the cage without getting sprayed, and how and where do I take it.

After several cups of coffee, I remembered that I had a tarp in the garage. I mustered the courage to deal with the skunk by covering the cage with the tarp. I slowly approached the cage with the tarp as a shield and laid it over the skunk without further incident. I continued to wrap the cage with the loose ends of the tarp until I had the entire cage securely wrapped. Now that I had this hurdle jumped, I called my father for assistance.

My father was still laughing when he arrived at my house; he was as clueless as I was on what to do. Fortunately he owned a pickup truck and we could use it to move the trapped skunk. My father, Erik my oldest son, he must have been around 5 years old at the time, and I piled into the pickup for our adventure. We slowly drove to the nearest park since I didn’t want the tarp to blow off the cage.

Once at the park, I took the trap and sat it on the ground away from my father, my son and the truck. We talked it over for a minute until I got the nerve to reach inside the tarp to unlatch the trap door. When the door was securely open, I ran from it as fast as could. We waited for five minutes and the skunk didn’t come out of the cage. After ten minutes, I walked up to the cage and gave it a light kick and then ran. I was amazed that the skunk wouldn’t leave the cage. My father and I just looked at each other in puzzlement. Jokingly my father told me to go over and shake the skunk out of the cage. The look I gave him surely indicated that he was insane, but after waiting another five minutes decided what the heck..

I left my son by the truck and told him he was about to witness two grown men running from a small fury animal; we slowly approached the cage. I grabbed the rear end of the cage and tilted it so that the open end was pointing to the ground. The skunk still didn’t come out. I lifted the cage higher and still nothing.

Then, in a moment of bravery, I picked up the cage and I gave it a good shake. Suddenly the cage got a little lighter. My father was already running away from me when I noticed that the skunk was on the ground at my feet. A split second later the cage was going one way, me another, and the skunk another.

After my first experience. I continued to trap at night in an attempt to capture the other skunk. In the process, I caught two raccoons, an opossum and eventually trapped the remaining skunk.
Work quickly spread throughout the neighborhood and I found myself doing favors for friends, relatives and neighbors. I continued to education myself on various trapping techniques eventually turning my new hobby into a business; the rest is history.

Ultimately, the answer to the question of how I became an animal trapper is by pure accident. My father, like many times before, was right again. As he would put it, “Ask and you shall receive”