Skunk Death

Everybody kept asking us, "So if you do catch a skunk, what are you gonna do with him?" Uhhhhh.... Kill him? How? Dunno.

We had a plan. Some of the websites said you could gas a skunk to death in about 10 minutes. So we did what many websites suggested: I held a big blanket in front of me, blocking the skunk's sight of me, walked up to the cage, and draped the blanket gently over the trap. Worked great. Didn't alarm the skunk at all.

We had tubes attached to the cage. We covered the trap with plastic, and put the hoses into the end of the tailpipe of the car. Some websites assured us that you could gas a skunk to death in about 10 minutes. HA! We gassed him for over an hour, and he wasn't dying.

Well, what else could we try? Poison? The only thing we had was antifreeze. We tried pouring that into the cage, but he didn't bother with it. Or didn't get enough to hurt him.

How do you kill things? We considered possibilities we'd seen on murder-mystery tv shows. Carbon monoxide didn't work. So suffocation wouldn't work either. We didn't really want to get close enough to give him a plate of poison hidden in hamburger. We didn't want to get close enough to give him a mallet to the head. We had nothing big enough and deep enough to drown him in. We thought about dragging the trap way out back and letting him starve to death. Besides not being very humane, it probably wouldn't have worked since skunks semi-hibernate, and he probably could've gone a long long time before starving to death. Didn't want to shoot him because we didn't want to wake the neighbors in the wee hours of the morning, and didn't particularly want to get close enough to have good aim through the bars of the cage. But seeing no other options, the gun became the best-looking option.

He'd ripped holes in the blanket that covered the trap. He'd pulled the plastic through the blanket-holes. So Gary stuck the point of the air-rifle through the blanket-hole where we could see some black fur, and shot blindly. Then we got odor and ran for the house. Five or ten minutes later, we went out to see what had happened. No rustling in the cage. When the cage was shaken, no wiggling. So he was dead. And the smell wasn't too bad because most of it was contained in the cage. (The holey blanket will go in the dumpster or get burned.)

Turned out that he was one smart skunk about the carbon monoxide. Not only did he manage to get rid of the plastic cover, but he pulled it inside the cage and used it to make a barrier between him and the hoses carrying the deadly gas. AND the little booger kept sticking his nose out the holes he'd chewed in the heavy blanket.

So now, when the neighbors ask "What do you DO with a skunk if you catch him?" we have a plethora of possibilities. Most of which do not work! Next time we'll go straight for an old mattress pad or blanket, and the gun.