The Business Man Trapper: Trapping As a Business In the 21st Century

By Casey Rayls

Have you ever wanted to work in the outdoors, for yourself, no time clock, no boss, no annoying co-workers and company politics? I do, and this book tells how I do it. I turned my love of hunting, trapping and wildlife into a full-time career. As far as I know, there are no training schools or courses that teach how do to this. This book chronicles my 22+ years as a Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator (NWCO-pronounced “newco”)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483453286

Book preview

THE BUSINESS MAN

TRAPPER

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Trapping as a Business in the 21st Century

CASEY RAYLS

Copyright © 2016 Casey Rayls

Editors: Casey Rayls & Benjie Walker

(B. Walker-Author of Transition to Euphoria)

Photos by Author, Missy Rayls and Tristan Gregory

Front and Back Cover Photos by Melissa Tice-Rayls

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5329-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5328-6 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 7/06/2016

Dedicated To:

…Me

I want to first and foremost dedicate this book to myself. I first ‘wrote’ a book at the kitchen table as a kid in the 1970s. The cover and back page was a ‘hollowed out’ Sports Afield magazine that I took the staples out of as I knew I had to have a cover, both front and back. I painted the cover with Testors model paint and a little paint brush I used to paint my model cars, which always looked like crap and not ‘cool’ like the other boys’ hot-rods. I then glued in notebook paper. I wrote two chapters, like 3 pages total about Bigfoot. My mom chastised me for messing around on the kitchen table. From a young age I wanted to write, it just took 40 years to get it done. My BA in English Literature from Northern Kentucky University (via Purdue) was an asset in the process, though not worth what it cost me in time and money.

Secondly, I need to dedicate this work to my wife, Melissa Ann Tice-Rayls. In the spring of 2016 I told her this book was about ready to go and that I needed to hire a publisher. She never hesitated and just said Do it. She is always supportive of my writing. Other things….eh, not so much. ☺

Finally, but just as importantly, I want to dedicate this text to the trappers and ‘wanna bes’ out there, the people who can’t accept a ‘real job’ and know there’s more to life than punching a clock. Maybe you’re a teenager in Iowa, Indiana, or who knows where that has the drive, the ambition, and the nerve to not ‘do as society expects.’ Maybe you want to start out on your own career path but don’t know how or where to find the first few steps how to get started. Let me tell you, this was almost impossible in a tiny Indiana town before the Internet gave up all the world’s secrets.

I’ve just saved you dreamers many, many years if you pay attention to this text and believe in yourself. It took me years to believe in myself as that evil self-doubt is always there, even 20+ years later. But it lessens every year. Or, maybe I give a shit less as time goes by.

Never, ever, EVER listen to anyone who supposedly knows more than you, if you’re not SURE, they know more than you. I’ve listened to several ‘experts’ in my time. Those that I thought were sure to be way ahead of me, made better grades, had a ‘better’ class of friends etc. only to look back years later and see that they were still tying their shoes in the starting blocks, doing stretches, and getting ready while the race was already half over, with myself out ahead somewhere.

It’s a fact that most millionaires fail several times in business before they find a gig that finally works out for them. The trouble is, most people are afraid to even try. That paycheck might not be there on Friday, and they don’t know what to do without it.

You must remember there was a time when sea shells were thought of as money.

You go you dreamer, you misfit, you social outcast, you hard headed asshole who won’t listen to the ‘experts’. You loser, the one who follows his soul, the vagabond drifter searching for a home. Push onward. Push on.

Sometimes the winner of a fight is declared by who falls to the mat last.

Epigraph

A ship which stays safely in port will never be sunk by a storm. However, it will eventually sink from a rotted hull.

Author Unknown

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 A.D.C. vs. Nuisance Control vs. Fur Trapping

Chapter 2 Why Urban Trapping?

Chapter 3 Business or Service?

Chapter 4 Your Service Area

Chapter 5 The Non Service Area

Chapter 6 Your Customers

Chapter 7 Working for Wages

Chapter 8 ADD-ONS ADD UP!

Chapter 9 THE OTHER $50,000

Chapter 10 Big Money

Chapter 11 Pricing

Chapter 12 Referrals

Chapter 13 Advertising

Chapter 14 Competition

Chapter 15 Employees

Chapter 16 Lifestyle

Chapter 17 Insurance, Incorporation, & Taxes

Chapter 18 Special by Bob Wendt

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Taken at Bob Wendt’s barn in Hancock Co. Indiana in the early 1990s, before I went full time as a NWCO. This was his quasi pet coyote that chased my truck along the lane off the county road back to Bob and Kathy’s cabin-just like a dog ! I thought Man, no wonder he catches so many ‘yotes, the damn things are thick up here. Yeah, I was that naïve back then until I realized what the yote was all about. Photo by Dr. Robert Wendt, DVM

About The Author:

As a kid, living in tiny Rising Sun, IN. (pop. about 2,300), in the 1970s-80s in the smallest county in Indiana, (Ohio County-82 square miles), there wasn’t a lot to do. We made our own recreation. Yes, Atari video games were common and many kids had them, but I didn’t.

Rising Sun is a river town. The Ohio River was literally 3 blocks from my house, and was a place to fish on summer evenings and splash on a diesel truck’s inner tube in the afternoons. There were no beaver, otter, bobcat, turkeys or grouse in this area until the 1990s. The otter and bobcats weren’t really known until the 2000s.

I, in fact, caught the first beaver in our area at age 19, around 1987, with the catch making the Rising Sun Recorder newspaper. Coyotes were just being caught here during the fur boom of the middle ‘70s.

My father, Norman E. Rayls, bought a subscription to The Trapper magazine during the ‘70s, from an older female cousin, Donita Chipman-Valentine, who was selling magazine subscriptions for school. I was hooked.

Drugs are all the rage in the news as I write this in 2014; however, trapping was an addiction much worse for me. In those days I studied each issue of The Trapper and Fur-Fish-Game, marveling at the photos of catches covering barns and sheds in these magical places where apparently fur animals were thick. I knew then and there, in my own house at 215 South High Street, that I wanted to make my living as a trapper. It took about 20 more years before I’d figure out how, as selling pelts wasn’t the answer. There simply weren’t enough animals in my area and, as a young man, I was limited as to where I could go as it cost money to run a big trap line.

It wasn’t until I started offering my trapping services for hire around 1995 that I started to see that I could make a living from trapping, but not fur trapping. I received a complimentary issue of Wildlife Control Technology magazine while working as a campus cop when I was finishing up my Associate’s degree in Law Enforcement at Northern Kentucky University.

I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Florence, KY working 4-10 hour shifts. I had almost 4 days a week off my night shift cop job and was bored living in an apartment in a ‘city’ (Florence was a big city to me compared to Rising Sun, IN).

So I read W.C.T. magazine in my apartment and said to myself; "These guys are making great money, doing what they love, doing what I’ve been doing for years for free!" I started right then and there formulating a business plan to quit the police job I hated (I had only been on the force 3 months). I began making hand bills, or flyers to put up at area bulletin boards and to mail to local police dispatch centers (I was clueless about how to advertise my services).

I was in college, a ‘non- traditional’ student because I was in my mid-late 20s. I didn’t have a computer to make flyers on my desktop. I bought a plastic template at a Dollar Store and made the flyers by hand! It was crude but it worked and slowly I became a Business Man Trapper.

Casey Rayls holds an Associate of Applied Science degree in Law Enforcement from Northern Kentucky University and a Bachelor’s of Arts in English Literature from the same institution. He also holds a self-proclaimed Ph.D. in Trapology and is the self-proclaimed Professor Emeritus of North American Trapper University.

He has taken formal trapping instruction from Craig O’Gorman, Broadus, MT (coyote), Randy Schworm, Gnadenhutten, OH (mink) and learned a helluva lot from friend and fellow Indiana Business Man Trapper, Dr. Robert ‘Bob’ Wendt, one of the hardest working and most successful trapper-businessmen in the entire United States-bar none.

Casey has written several articles for Wildlife Control Technology magazine, one for The Trapper and Predator Caller magazine and one for the Trapper Yearbook (Trapper and Predator Caller magazine).

In March 2006, Casey was offered a career position with the USDA-Wildlife Services Division in North Dakota as a Biological Science Technician (government trapper). He declined this $36k/year position as being his own Business Man Trapper was paying so much more. However, flying to N.D. and going thru the interview process was fun and an adventure in and of itself he said.

In July 2006, he was back in the Dakotas working on the ‘bird flu’ project with the USDA-Wildlife Services. He remembers it being 113 degrees in North Dakota that week and his wife, Melissa was having health issues back in Indiana. That stint lasted a week-he went back to Indiana. So much for the ‘north’ part.

In October 2006, he was offered a job again at the GS-7 level, with the same agency. But, this time in Indiana, working on the newly formed downtown Indianapolis Starling Roosting Project. This was a fledgling project just implemented and frankly, the State Director had no clue how to run a starling program. Only one other state in the Union had accomplished this task before. Personalities clashed, and in January 2007, an independent trapper went back to little Rising Sun, Indiana to continue working as a Business Man Trapper.

Casey still lives in Rising Sun, IN, in ‘The Holler,’ in a house made of 100+ year old white oak beams, a trapper’s dream cabin of sorts. He is married to Melissa Tice-Rayls. They have no children, but enjoy their Labrador retriever and Walker ‘coon hound. An annual trip to Iowa for pheasant hunting is always a treat. Rental property in Indiana and Tennessee round out the formula outlined for the Business Man Trapper.

Foreward

by Bob Noonan of The Trapper’s Post, Canaan, Maine USA

I met Casey while I was the editor of Wildlife Control Technology (WCT) magazine, a national publication serving people who did nuisance wildlife control work professionally. I talked to him a number of times on the phone, and realized immediately he had a very good grasp of how to run a nuisance wildlife business. We began the magazine in 1994, just as a large number of trappers were entering the nuisance field hoping to make a living doing what they loved, and many of them were floundering because they had no business experience or education. They might be excellent trappers, but they had little or no grasp of basic business principle such as pricing, time management, advertising, record keeping, etc.

The two basic goals of WCT magazine were to educate readers in efficient trapping methods, but more importantly, in how to successfully run a business. Casey had achieved that goal, and so I asked him to write for us. He did, and produced several information-packed articles that were well received, and that definitely helped raise the consciousness and awareness of beginning trapper businessmen. He helped us do our job, and made a real contribution to the industry.

I’ve looked at several chapters of this book, and I can see that Casey has put in it information that will help not only trappers who are beginning a business, but also those who are already established. The price of this book is less than a steak dinner for two in a good restaurant – but the information in it will last a lot longer than that dinner.