You folks in the UK are really disadvantaged in that, unless I
am mistaken, you do not have skunks living in the wild. If you
do not have them, you don't want them as they have several
traits that make them bad neighbors.
They are about the size of a house cat, black with a
white stripe down their backs and they have evolved a chemical
warfare strategy that would make the North Koreans smile with
glee.
When they get annoyed with let's say, being cornered by
a larger animal or being caught in a trap, they blast about a
teaspoon full of musk from two glands at the base of their tails.
The ejection of the musk is done such that it atomizes in to
tiny droplets in the air and is breathtakingly foul at close
range.
You can probably smell them well over a mile away and
the musk sticks to anything such as your dog's coat or you or me
if we are close enough.
Besides the gas attack, they are known carriers of
rabies.
We have tons of them in the Americas, all the way from
Canada to Argentina.
They can take up residence under your house if they find
a way in. They are mostly nocturnal but if their brains are
deranged, they can become active during the day and attack
people who then must undergo rabies vaccinations and whose
neighbors will probably avoid them for a while.
We've had a couple of those little creatures visit our
house in the last 20 years, but nothing terrible happened. One
got in to our garage and Beverly saw it walking around when she
opened the door.
If I had opened the door, I wouldn't have seen it and
would have walked in and probably scared it enough that it would
have fired.
We ended up pushing the button to raise the garage door
and the skunk made a break for freedom without shooting first.
The other time, an obviously very sick skunk staggered
in to our back yard and spent the night wandering around and
falling down every few steps.
The next morning, we called the animal welfare
department and they came out and threw a heavy blanket over the
sick skunk and trapped him that way before he bit anybody or
attacked our dog.
Most of the times, we will be going down a street or
highway and catch a strong whiff of skunk spray and there, in
the middle of the road, will be the dead body of the source of
the smell. They don't have much fear of traffic and they pay the
ultimate price for it.
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