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Well, with ten fruit trees in my yard I battle against the skunks on a daily basis in the summer. I have built myself a trap that is very effective. It basically is a box with chicken wire over one end to make it seem more open, with a pressure plate trigger that activates a mouse trap to pull a pin and drop that back door. I bait it with cat food and that works extremely well. (Makes me wonder how the darned things got a taste for that, eh?) After the skunk is trapped, I put another box on the back end, open the back door, and transfer the skunk to the portable box by squirting it with a hose through the chicken wire end. (just like the transfer lions at the zoo minus the hose treatment.)

I caught five last summer and two so far this summer including the "Mother of All Skunks" last night. It must have weighed thirty pounds!

Honestly, I'd like to kill them all. They are vermin of the worst kind. They carry diseases like rabies, they dig up my yard and garden, chase my cat, terrorize the entire neighborhood with their sprays, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

But I'm pretty non-violent these days.

I tried taking them to the pound. Now here's a mystery: our pound destroys over a hundred cats and dogs a day, but if you take them a skunk, they just release it along the river?!!! You'll kill thousands of house pets a year, but you won't kill a skunk?!!

So that leaves me a couple of choices:

1. I can fill the transport box with water (it's plastic) and drown them. that makes for a mess when they die and leaves me dealing with feces-filled, possibly diseased water.

2. Leave them in the transport box until they die of heat and thirst. Probably only take a couple of days, but horribly inhumane and mean.

3. Hook them up to the tailpipe of the car and gas them. Humane, quick, and painless, but I still have to deal with the body. I also thought of bleach tablets and ammonia (instant chlorine gas) but that'd probably end up killing me too.

4. Take them out to the high desert and let them go. they may not find their way back to my house since It's over ten miles away, but now they will terrorize someone else's property.



Well, I choose number four every time. Even though I vow each time that "I'm going to KILL this one!!" I never seem to be able to do it.

What a mess.....:-5

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That's my solution every time I catch a pest - ours don't grow to thirty plus pounds but, given the effect on the wife, they might as well be

My husband used to trap raccoons and release them at the river. I'd swear they beat the car home half the time. I could picture them running behind the car, pointing and laughing as they came back. :yh_rotfl

Saint_;1322689 wrote: Well, with ten fruit trees in my yard I battle against the skunks on a daily basis in the summer. I have built myself a trap that is very effective. It basically is a box with chicken wire over one end to make it seem more open, with a pressure plate trigger that activates a mouse trap to pull a pin and drop that back door. I bait it with cat food and that works extremely well. (Makes me wonder how the darned things got a taste for that, eh?) After the skunk is trapped, I put another box on the back end, open the back door, and transfer the skunk to the portable box by squirting it with a hose through the chicken wire end. (just like the transfer lions at the zoo minus the hose treatment.)

I caught five last summer and two so far this summer including the "Mother of All Skunks" last night. It must have weighed thirty pounds!

Honestly, I'd like to kill them all. They are vermin of the worst kind. They carry diseases like rabies, they dig up my yard and garden, chase my cat, terrorize the entire neighborhood with their sprays, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.

But I'm pretty non-violent these days.

I tried taking them to the pound. Now here's a mystery: our pound destroys over a hundred cats and dogs a day, but if you take them a skunk, they just release it along the river?!!! You'll kill thousands of house pets a year, but you won't kill a skunk?!!

So that leaves me a couple of choices:

1. I can fill the transport box with water (it's plastic) and drown them. that makes for a mess when they die and leaves me dealing with feces-filled, possibly diseased water.

2. Leave them in the transport box until they die of heat and thirst. Probably only take a couple of days, but horribly inhumane and mean.

3. Hook them up to the tailpipe of the car and gas them. Humane, quick, and painless, but I still have to deal with the body. I also thought of bleach tablets and ammonia (instant chlorine gas) but that'd probably end up killing me too.

4. Take them out to the high desert and let them go. they may not find their way back to my house since It's over ten miles away, but now they will terrorize someone else's property.



Well, I choose number four every time. Even though I vow each time that "I'm going to KILL this one!!" I never seem to be able to do it.

What a mess.....:-5


oh yeah, that makes sense....euthanize cats & dogs and save the skunks.

thing is....a skunk can be released back into the wild....



It sounds like you have quite the nasty problem there.:-5 -----30 lb skunks?:-3

would it be to expensive to put 'blood meal' down?

Animals detest the smell and its great for gardens of all kinds.

I didn't know fruit trees attract skunks. I learned something today. I don't want fruit trees!

Considering a skunk has 4 to 7 kits per year, good luck trying to capture the whole family, including mom and dad. :wah:

Skunks are omnivores and will eat anything that is seasonally available. If your apples are on the ground, they'll be attracted to the free dinner.

Best thing I have found to repel skunks are moth balls and ammonia. But you have to clean up the habitat they are enjoying to rid yourself of them.

One day when my little brother Daryl was six he was on his way to play with his friend Jimmy. Their farm butted up against the back of ours, so Daryl just had to walk out to our back pasture, cross the fence and walk through their woods and fields to the house.

Somewhere along the way, he hit trouble, big trouble. I heard Daryl coming before I saw him. Hell, I smelled him before I could see him too. He smelled like skunk. He was balling his eyes out, had vomited all over his shirt and kept falling down in his haste to get to his mommy. I felt a bit sorry for him but laughed anyway.

So, he was made to strip down in the yard. Granny told me to burn his clothes as she got the wash tub ready. Mom and granny scrubbed him with tomatos and lemon juice, warm water, more tomatos, more lemon juice until he started smelling like boy again. Skunks are not usually out in the daytime, so Daryl's skinny body was checked for bite marks. There were none. Lucky him. He must have surprised one somewhere along the way.

Yeah, I'm pretty lucky I haven't gotten sprayed myself yet although the cat came in with some spray on his paw once and stunk up the house for days. If the skunk can't get his tail up, he can't use the muscles needed to spray (or so I'm told) so I designed my trap and transfer cages to insure that. Even so, I never get near the open side of the trap until I've hosed the skunk into the transfer box. My research says that skunks can spray up to 16 feet! Not only that, but the spray is some kind of weird enzyme or acid that can blind you!



(Skunk spray is composed mainly of low molecular weight thiol compounds,[6] namely (E)-2-butene-1-thiol, 3-methyl-1-butanethiol, and 2-quinolinemethanethiol, as well as acetate thioesters of each of these.[7][8] These compounds are detectable by the human nose at concentrations of only 10 parts per billion.[9])

Yes, they do spray quite a distance. They usually only spray when startled or threatened. We have several by us too. My wife just goes out and talks to them and tells them they have to move on. :wah: So far, she's been lucky and hasn't been sprayed. They just mosey on off. Neat creature, they are. And quite often misunderstood.

My daughter's house that I was visiting last week had 3 young skunks that would come to the cat's (a stray) dish in their courtyard to eat every night. They thought it was cute until I told them that they can be a carrier of rabies. We were going to try the mothballs, rather than ammonia because neighbors' cats come into their courtyard too.

Family Brings Home Baby Skunk With Rabies - Des Moines News Story - KCCI Des Moines

You could strangle it.

Well, I thought I had caught all of them, but I saw another hole dug under the fence today so that means I have at least one more. I put my trap right on the inside of the tunnel and blocked off the sides so that if they use that tunnel again, they'll come up right inside the trap. The chicken wire other end is open enough that I hope they'll mosey down to the pressure plate trigger.

We'll see tomorrow....:-3