If you have a five -and-a-half foot Timber Rattlesnake in your home that you want removed, who you gonna call? A Hendersonville resident facing that exact situation recently called Animal Pros Wildlife Removal.

Not to fear, the snake was brought to Hendersonville by the resident from a hunting trip so neither it, nor little baby snakes, were ever loose in the city. Once it was determined that it needed to go back to the wild, the resident called Ryan Hall, owner and founder of Animal Pros.

“The snake was in secure container but had to put it into a five-gallon safety bucket which was quite a job in itself,” Hall said, adding that his customer preferred to remain anonymous. Hall transported the snake to a wooded area about 30 miles away but not before a photo of him hoisting the snake went viral on the Internet leading to many calls to Hall from Hendersonville Police and Fire Departments and various news agencies.

All this led to questions about how a man can make a living removing wild animals in a mostly suburban area. Turns out, there is plenty of wildlife to be removed, says Hall, a lifelong Hendersonville resident and a 1998 graduate of Beech High School. He started the business in 2007 after working for a similar company in Florida.

 “We have to run seven vehicles to keep up with nothing but wildlife problems,” said Hall, who serves most of all Tennessee and Kentucky. “Every year, construction pushes wild animals into smaller wooded areas which cause problems. Many times construction crews come in putting a house up pretty quick and leave behind food and drinks which attracts wildlife.”

He also noted that a lot of people have bird feeders that will attract wildlife including raccoons and snakes.

Animal Pros deals with animals you expect to find in Middle Tennessee like opossums, skunks and ground hogs. And some you might not expect to find including otters and armadillos.

“Armadillos have migrated this way. We haven’t had any cases around here but have had some west of us in the Dickson and Center Point areas, the outskirts of Nashville,” Hall said. “Armadillos are bringing in fire ants, which is another serious problem.”

Hall dealt with an issue in Franklin a couple of years ago where a customer saw an otter come from the Harpeth River to eat from their koi fish pond.

“We set traps for them and put up a big perimeter fence and only caught one otter,” Hall explained. “We knew one otter couldn’t be eating all the fish that were missing so we set up some cameras and we got pictures of someone going to her property at night to get the fish.”

Last week, Hall removed a seven foot Gray Rat snake from behind Goodlettsville City Hall. “They had some birds in the soffit area and snake went in a cleaned them all out,” Hall said. “They couldn’t see the whole snake, just a section of it, but I could tell from the width of the foot how big he was going to be.”

Hall has received business the last few months from the Animal Planet cable channel to come behind productions of some of their shows to deal with the animals. “After they stage a show, like The Turtle Man (Call of the Wild), we’ve gone in and done the actually cleanup; get all the animals out, fill up the openings and such,” he said.

Hall sees the wildlife problem getting worse and his business future getting better. “We are still growing and I think we will continue to expand in to other areas because wildlife problems are getting worse and are everywhere.”

 By Randy Cline