Ryan Katz is the owner of Graduate Canine Solutions and handles Mia and Hugo in the field. He has spent 25 years in pest management. He was raised in the trade by his father, an entomologist, completed coursework in entomology at Farmingdale State College, and has continued his training through PestWorld, the Purdue Pest Management Conference, and the Bobby Corrigan Rodent Academy.
His work has covered close to every situation New York City can put in front of a technician, from rats to roaches and bed bugs to mosquitoes. Over that time he has concentrated on structural rodent exclusion. He comes at it from the construction side: how a building is framed, where the plumbing and electrical run and penetrate, and how shared walls, shared spaces, and shared sewer lines connect one property to the next.
Ryan speaks and teaches on rodent work and exclusion in the United States, for ACPUB in Mexico, and for the Pest Management Association of Nigeria. In Querétaro, Mexico, he helped set up and run a rodent safari that took more than 100 association members into the field.
Graduate's canine program started with an introduction. A friend and trusted colleague in the industry put Ryan in touch with Kimberly Camera. For five weeks the two had only spoken by phone. In September 2025, Ryan drove from Long Island to Tennessee and South Carolina to pick up two Patterdale Terriers, Mia and Hugo, arrived at Kim's 14-acre property late at night, and was welcomed as if they had known each other for years.
What he found there was a working canine program built with care: planned facilities, and dogs that excel at rodent detection and abatement, bed bug detection, and nuisance wildlife work. Kim trained Mia and Hugo and remains his guide on everything canine. Two family-owned companies working together is how a smaller firm takes on work at this level.
The reason for adding dogs is simple. An inspector reads evidence: droppings, sebum, footprints, tail drags, disturbed insulation. That works where the evidence can be seen. It does not work under dense groundcover, across a facility measured in millions of square feet, or in a yard where the burrow openings are hidden. A trained dog works by scent, so it finds what is there whether anyone can see it or not.
The jobs bear that out. In Brooklyn, the dogs found burrow systems in vegetation that people on foot could not locate. In Pennsylvania, they worked detection across 1.6 million square feet. In Dallas, Ryan and Kim were brought in to find what the operators on site could not.
Detection is where the industry is going because it answers the first question on any rodent job: where are they? Once that is known, the structural work can be put in the right place. The dog finds the problem, and the exclusion fixes it.
Rodent Detection · Abatement · Consulting