I've been looking forward to this article for awhile. I met Paul back in August of 2017 through work and over time we have become good friends. Mr. Dube is the Branch Manager for Catseye Pest Control: New England, a company with a strong focus on nuisance wildlife control. He's been a personal mentor of mine when it comes to fur trapping, and though I keep trying to return the favor, work and family seem to keep him out of the woods when it comes to hunting these days.
Paul did not grow up in a family of sportsmen, however, even though he's a millennial, his childhood was much like mine; if the sun's up, you're outside. He spent a lot of time exploring the woods around his home with his sister, and as with most of us wild children, he encountered wildlife often. He shared a few small tales of bringing home orphaned animals like skunks and raccoons home which I imagine terrorized his parents.
After graduating high school, Paul planned on going on to higher education in the field of wildlife biology. Instead, life took him in the direction of the work force. Here he found an affinity for the outdoor lifestyle through seeing his father-in-law hunting in the fall, and his experiences. He signed up and took the Basic Trapper Education class through Mass Wildlife. As with many who have taken this class over the years, he met a man who would help define Paul's views: Malcolm Speicher. Malcolm and Paul remain in communication today as they both hold positions in the Massachusetts Trapper's Association.
It was then that he landed his first job dealing with animals. A local pest control company hired him as what Massachusetts calls a Problem Animal Control Agent. To the rest of the country, these technicians are usually referred to as wildlife control operators or nuisance wildlife technicians. Having a natural skill at handling animals, especially when face to face with them in a confined space, he quickly advanced to running the wildlife division.
As with most NWCOs, he loves the emergency calls where he actually gets to apply hands on tactics instead of just setting traps, so I thought I'd share one of his favorites:
A few years back, when Paul was still new at the aforementioned company, he received a call for a sick skunk wandering the parking lot of one of their customers. He hung up the phone and was on his way.
Arriving on site, he quickly located the "sick" skunk stumbling around the parking lot. The skunk was not actually sick, but had instead become entangled in a fast food drink lid. He grabbed his Kevlar gloves and approached the skunk.
Once in range, he sprang into action grabbing the main body towards the neck with one hand and sliding the tail under his own knee to keep the skunk from spraying. At this point he got his first surprise; skunks do not need to lift their tail in order to spray. However, there was a more pressing concern, Paul could now see that the lid was so tight around the skunks neck that it was having trouble breathing.
He now had two problems: the skunk was in distress and suffocating, and his tools were 20 yards away in his truck. He noticed that there was a gentlemen looking on with apparent amusement so he hollered over to him asking if he would grab his snips for him. The gentlemen replied "No sir! You're on your own!"
Lucky for Paul, there was another onlooker nearby that heard the exchange and came over to help. Snips now in hand, he quickly cut the lid off of the skunk and placed the bewildered animal in a cage.
Paul now reminisces that he learned two things that day: (1) always have the tools you might need close at hand and (2) skunks can spray with their tails down. He muses that his knee smelled for a week.
After a few years of running the wildlife division, Paul began to feel stagnated. The company did not want to grow the division at all. He was approached by a friend who worked for another company out of New York and he decided to take a look. After some research and an interview, Paul ended up joining the Catseye team out of their Castleton branch. In 2017, Catseye opened a branch in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Paul was selected to manage the branch.
Paul now runs the division with 10 Pest technicians treating properties for rodents and insects, 3 wildlife technicians removing animals from people's homes, and 8 CatGuard crews. The CatGuard is an interesting process where the technicians seal up homes preventing basically anything with a backbone from entering unless the homeowner lets it in. The fact that they offer a renewable warranty is testimony to how much work the company, Paul himself, and all of his guys have put into dealing with wildlife on ethical and humane levels.
I was recently able to follow Paul along for an emergency call of a skunk trapped in someone's basement. We spent about 30 minutes on site searching for it before Paul found it holed up in a trash bag.
Then the real work began as you can see from this short video I was able to take of him grabbing it. These jobs are the reasons both Paul and I have fallen in love with this type of work.
Now that he's been spending more time locally for work, Paul has been able to focus more time on his side dreams. It's not odd to see him trudging through the muck at 3am checking cages during trapping season. It would be odd, however, to see him perched in a tree stand with a bow waiting for a whitetail to pass. I can't even seem to get him out into the woods for a Saturday during turkey season (and I've tried for 2 years now).
As for myself, I was a sportsman before entering into the business, but Paul was not. Much of what he learned, looking for sign, training your game eye, and targeting specific animals, he learned on the job, and through questions for Malcolm and other trappers. You might not gain the notoriety of being a film celebrity like Remi Warren or the fame of an outdoor writer like Mark Kenyon, but you can still get in the business of hunting and trapping. Being in the business can get you mentors, and definitely keeps you trained year round if you work for a decent company, and in the case of service... get you in the door to ask for permissions to hunt and trap on properties.
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