Pest Force

Other elements within Pest Force are listed in the Contents.

Pest Force is a unit dedicated to a systems approach to vertebrate animal damage management. Wildlife resource management involves not only changing large wild animal populations (increasing, stabilizing, or decreasing them), but also changing their values and actual and perceived effects. The animals are presumed to be a human resource and need careful, cost-effective management.

The Pest Force is an integrated vertebrate damage management enterprise. It exists to meet the needs of citizens, corporations, and agencies and to serve the pest control industry that is typically involved with insect and invertebrate animal problems. It is a private, for-profit corporation seeking to improve comprehensive, total system management with partner enterprises of the R* System. The recognized needs are in mastering relations and making tradeoffs within the System and society. For example, one group of people may want to increase deer; others (perhaps including some in that group) may want to reduce deer damage to crops. Some wanting to increase bears may find sheep and bee-hive losses intolerable.

The Pest Force concentrates on damage, not necessarily on the animal apparently causing it, then seeks to reduce and manage that damage legally, humanely, and cost-effectively. It is sensitive to human regard for life and treatment of animals, but it is also realistic about the threats related to animals of rabies, tularemia, leptospirosis, encephalitis, and psiticosis. The interaction of the fleas of cats and dogs to those brought to them by mice and other animals is well known.

The planned company (being designed) has an effective program of city and neighborhood rat control and offers mouse control. It is equally responsive to select needs of people for solutions immediate and long-term, for household and corporate problems with bats, moles, snakes, geese (golf courses), woodpeckers, feral cats and dogs, squirrels, gulls (airports), starlings, skunks, muskrats (pond dams) and garden pests. It offers effective deer management strategies.

The Pest Force emphasizes work on damage, analyzing it relative to costs over time of controls and uses a combination of methods, often selected with the aid of a computer, to select an optimum strategy of damage management. The customer may implement the selected and recommended strategy, or it may obtain the Pest Force services to do so. Fees are paid for the visit, analysis, and implementation.

The Pest Force with the Lasting Forests' Wildland Knowledge Base builds a database and report system and provides every customer with unusual information about each species of pest. An internal, evolving expert system in the enterprise computer is a highly-valued proprietary resource.

The Pest Force is not a group of trappers (though trapping may be the only cost-effective, legal, safe, and timely response to a disease-related or fierce animal problem). Its trained staff is willing to work in often-dangerous conditions in order to solve people's immediate, often costly problems. Many of the problems are not those of direct financial loss, but of lost quality of life-sleeplessness, fear, annoyance, uncertainty. The staff experiences the pleasure of helping people, improving the environment, protecting it from often unnecessary large-scale, simplistic, animal control efforts, and working to improve the R* System itself.

The Pest Force works with students and faculty at Virginia Tech, providing employment and experience for undergraduate students, and research and project options for graduate students and faculty. The animals involved in the work of the Pest Force are measured and results are used by scientists to learn more about the animals and the effective control of their actual or perceived damages. Unique problems do occur and the staff, with a taskforce, will attack such problems. In some cases research is needed, but the R* System typically uses a rationally robust strategy (Giles et al. 1995), adaptive management, and a sophisticated computer employing "expert system" software.

The Pest Force offers geographic information system (GIS) analyses. One recurrent theme in damage management is that the wrong crops (or other things of value) are put in the wrong places. "They could not have picked a worse place!" is often heard. GIS can help developers avoid problems by selecting the right or "least bad" spots for crops, livestock, buildings, etc. GIS can help explain problem causes, identify trends, project future problems as land uses change due to ecological succession or urban sprawl.

The Pest Force offers unusual design services. Major pest damage problems arise in faulty design. Simple changes in architecture or building construction can avoid costly damage reduction work year after year. The Pest Force has a question-answer software unit that allows contractors, developers, and architects to solve some of their own animal damage design problems (personally and within the security of their creative spaces). Personal advice from staff is also available because unique structures will not likely be addressed by the software available.

The potential negative influences of wild animals (financial and esthetic) are seen as:

1. Wildlife may cause injury to crops, feedlots, forest regeneration, grasslands, and livestock. (Whether profits are reduced or not must be decided in each case.) They may become so abundant they are destructive or intolerable near human structures. Some species may build up populations that can serve as vectors of human disease. In much of the state, rabies is a problem. Extensive habitat work can create high populations of a dominant rabies carrier - e.g., the gray fox, or raccoon.
2. In discussing wildlife damage, there is a big difference between the injury that animals do to trees and plants and the actual damage they cause. Damage is measured by loss of profit, or actual benefits that are forgone. Rabbits may browse on trees but unless that can be shown to reduce significantly the profits received from the final forest harvest, that is only injury, not damage.
3. In some areas where regeneration is planned, mice and birds may have to be controlled to allow seeds to germinate and a plantation to start.
4. In severe winters, girdling of tree stock may occur requiring animal reductions or wire protection for trees.
5. Sometimes in areas where deer have low densities, the population can build rapidly and may cause some problems. with forestation.
6. The need for bird control will have to be monitored if compost or other solid waste is used over wildlife areas.

Internet Resource

A link of possible interest related to exotic species.

See The Trevey for more specific comments and a Planning document text on pest management.

The laws related to controlling animals are now very complex. Trained, certified, bonded staff can avoid these issues, adding further to cost effectiveness and increased expected value of services provided. Expert testimony can be provided.

A sub-unit, one often with parallel work and emphases is …

The Raccoon Group proposed for being within Rural System. It is discussed here.

The group of animals with great appeal and with unexploited financial potentials is one for intensive management, the furbearers. A rich variety of these animals lives on the area--raccoon, beaver, weasel, mink, and others. These need management since they can compromise other management objectives but they can also be changed into a profitable managerial enterprise. Much research has been done on them, but much, much more is needed and few people realize the complexity and relations of their system and that of other components of the Foundation lands and its objectives. The need is for some of the most intense, far-reaching research any where in the world. It should not be on the biology of the animal alone (the past trend) but on the total profitable enterprise. Agencies have waited for funds but none to our knowledge have stabilized an intensive management system including feedback and future predictions. The prospects are not for recreational trapping (strongly opposed by some) but for a viable, profitable enterprise utilizing one of the natural products of an area...in ways no one else has been able to sustain in the past.

The emphasis of a major part of the work is on the raccoon. Extensive research results can be brought to showing a superior, total resource system for one species.

Furs are a primary interest. The strategies include marketing; strategic buying; improvements in trapper success and humane taking; improved care of the pelts; storage; local cutting and trimming; alternative uses of partials; and alternative uses of the entire carcass. Fur markets seem to fluctuate due to style and other phenomena. We propose to work with the fur industry, seek new marketing strategies, avoid public confrontations, retain a private-for-profit stance, diversify the work of the group, and demonstrate the potentials of storage to achieve sale when prices are high.

Work will include sophisticated research (expected to attract visitors and students); furbearer workshops for state and federal biologists; trapper schools; vertebrate pest damage manager schools; fur-buyer schools. Software development will enhance some work, especially as it shows how communities (that support each furbearer) change over time. Trapping zones, presence of animal sign, species conflicts, profit per unit area, costs-to-take maps, are planned elements of the system. Visitors may come to the area with the planned objective of seeing and photographing all of the furbearers present. (A newsletter announces the successful people, tells of research accomplishments, shares in knowledge of the furbearers, provides excellent photographs, poems, new book suggestions and other natural history information of interest. Close links are built with Nature Folks.

Where feasible, funds for special projects will be sought from federal and state research fund pools but for the first 5 years, the work in local, highly synthetic, linking ecological succession in all communities and types to the many species commonly known as furbearers. Even if no furs are ever taken or sold, the number of large, difficult-to-see, top-of-the-food-web animals is very important to the ecology of the area and must be mastered. The rodent-, predator-, grass-, deer-system is an example of a small, conspicuous system that needs knowledge and management.

The financial base of the system will come from schools, memberships, tours, individual guests on the area, volunteer work (in-kind salary equivalents), workshops, publications, photo opportunities (for a fee), art commissions, sale of harvested products (glands, bones, biological instruction kits), and new products and services of the Pest Force .

The actions likely to be involved include skunk removal, snake removal, rabbits in a garden, groundhog in gardens of various types, groundhogs in riding areas, pigeons in barns, deer from lawns and gardens, deer/auto strikes, bats in attics, wasp hives, raccoon in chimney, stray cats, urban pigeons, starlings at feedlots, squirrels in houses

Feedback: Whenever the museum is used, a 5% of the bill is contributed to the museum as part of the service and to further the museum.

Legislative action: There are new problems arising in an urbanizing society due to vertebrate pests. The problems cross many branches of government that have been organized to assist people in dealing with such problems. Rabies, for example, is a health problem but it occurs in wild animals ( a game department resoponsibility) but it also occurs on farms and affects livestock (an agricultural realm of work). There are many similar problems, some affecting federally protected birds. There are coyotes invading, bears damaging bee hives, raccoons and skunks in houses, birds despoiling animal feedlots, etc. There are humane control problems, disease issues, as well as those of the landowner responsibility (source of the animal?) education, and many more. A key issue is who may legally, cost effectively, and humanely control the damage. The state of laws and regulations is now confused, indecipherable.

The Pest Force might seek a contract with a legislative act to create a program based on practical experience and analyses for an integrated vertebrate pest damage management ssystem for a region of the state. This would provide a test and demonstration of the need, opportunities, and results of a rational program of integrated damange management within a brief period (5 years). The program would include a review of the existing legislation, suggest alternatives, and allow a full range of responsible, creative experimentation that might be expanded to other regions.

This is viewed as a start-up action group with expansion possibilities. A relatively small amount of start-up equipment and transportation are required. Office and computer support with marketing are anticipated from System Central of the R* System.

Other elements within Pest Force are listed in the Contents.

Possible contacts include:

Safe-N-Sound Live Traps, PO Box 52, Highway 175, Morrison, IA 50657 call 1-800-648-cage

Jungle Tamers, 1200 Blain St., High Point, NC 27262JUNGLETMR@AOL.COM

See Kelly Registration Systems for pesticides available in Virginia.

References

Bebee, C.N. 1989. Vertebrate Pest Control, Beltsville,:MD. (Virginia Tech Library ) Call # S21 S12 B5 no.85.

Bookhout, T.A. ed., 1994. Research and Management Techniques for Wildlife and Habitats. The Wild. Soc. Bethesda,:MD.

Boudreau, C.W. 1975. How to Win the War With Pest Birds. Wildl. Tech., Hollister, California. 174 pp. Call # SB995 B69.

Hawbaker, S.S. Trapping North American Furbearers: A Complete Guide on Trapping all North American Furbearers for Both Amateur and Professional. Call # SK283 H3 1965.

Hone, J., and H. Mulligan. 1982. Vertebrate Pesticides. Sci. Bull. 89, Dep. Agric. New South Wales, Australia. 130 pp.

Hygnstrom, S.E., R.M. Timm, and G.E. Larson, eds. 1994. Prevention and Control of Wildlife Damage. United States. Call # SF84.4 P74.

Kenaga, E.E. 1979. Avian and Mammalian Wildlife Toxicology. Call # TA410 A43 no.693.

Mallis, A. 1990. Handbook of Pest Control. 7th ed. Cleveland, Ohio. Call # TX325 M3 1990

Pimentel, D. 1991. CRC Handbook of Pest Management in Agriculture. Boca Raton. Call # SB950 C7 1991.

Worthing, c.R., ed. 1991. The Pesticide Manual: A World Compendium, 9th ed. British Crop Prot. Counc., Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom.

Stern, V.M. 1973. Economic thresholds. Ann. Rev. Ent 18:259-280

Metcalf, R.L. ed. 1972. Pest control strategies for the future. Nat. Acad. Sci., Washington, DC 376pp.

Murton, R.K. ed. The problem of birds as pests, New York Academy Press

Olkowski, W. et al. 1976. Ecosystem management: a framework for urban pest control. BioScience 26:384-389.

National Acad. Sci. 1969. Principles of plant and animal pest control 1:205 pp; 2:471pp; ,4:172pp.

University's Federation for Animal Welfare. 1969. Humane control of animals living in the wild , England

Henderson, Junius. 1932 Economic mammalogy. Thomas, Springfield, Il.