I have a skunk in my trap

It’s a live trap….so the skunk is alive. Not exactly what we were looking for but now what do I do? My son would like to skin him but I don’t know how you do that without getting sprayed. Any thoughts?

Oh oh….mom just put her foot down and said NO SKUNK IN THIS HOUSE!!

good luck! happened twice to me. i heard if you shoot them between the eyes they wont spray. well i shot the first one with a 22 and she sprayed, dont know where i hit it though. second one an oldtimer said if you can get a sharp knife into the trap the skunk will kill itself by running into the blade out of curiosity, again no dice. waited till that one starved but that took about 2 weeks. hope someone has an answer for you!!!!! pout

not too sure but i once heard that if you can get close enough to them with out spraying, you can inject them with accitone. i’m thinkin thats a little trick or something but maybe someone on here will know.

Well, we went out and shot it from a good distance through the cage. At first we didn’t smell anything so we thought it didn’t spray. We were able to get within a couple of feet and really not much smell at all. So we decided to wait a little more for it to die completely. I walked over to our trail cam which is about 50 feet away. As I walked down to the cam I ran into the worst smelling funk you could ever smell. Holy crap! I didn’t think there was any wind but there was a slight breeze that had been taking the smell away from us. That smell was so bad you could taste it so I backed out of that area. After more time we put on rubber gloves and dumped him out of the cage. We could now tell that he had sprayed. I couldn’t stand the smell but my son could handle it. Of course he still wanted to skin it but after some discussion (and the fact that I was not going to help him) he gave up that thought. So he picked him up for some pictures and then we placed him in another spot in the woods.

Since we didn’t get sprayed we thought we didn’t smell. Wrong!! Headed into the house and the women of the house quickly picked up on our odor. They were right….we stunk….so clothes went into the washer and a quick shower took care of most of it. I tried to air out the garage but it still smells this morning. I think it is going to be a few days before it all clears out.

If I had to do it over again, we would just shoot it and leave it there for a few weeks. That seems wasteful but there is no way I would try to let that thing out of the cage and risk a direct spray…NO WAY!

I ran a trapline when I was a kid and caught countless skunks…I had read (way back then) that the trick to killing them without having them spray was to shoot ’em through the lungs. Air out those lungs and they can’t generate the pressure against their diaphram to spray. I dunno. I field tested it several times, and had mixed results. Sometimes it worked, often times it did not.

As for the livetrap situation, good luck to you. If you’re able to gently cover the cage with a blanket (without having him spray), you could pick it up and drop him in the lake (or a garbage can full of water.

A head shot skunk will spray nearly every time. A lungshot skink will spray about 50% of the time.

Skunks spray as a last resort for protection. If you make no fast movements and talk really calmly in a soothing voice, they will usually relax and let you get right up close and cover the trap. A blanket or sheet works better than a tarp – due to the noise a tarp makes.

Once covered, exhaust from a vehicle piped into the contained area will let them expire with no spray. I would imagine that ether(starting fluid) would produce the same effect.

BTW – a skunk needs his front feet to be able to grab something to convulse and spray. I know a fellow that picked one up by the tail to prove this. As it turns out, he is right. It also turned out that it only takes a skunk about 3-4 seconds to realize that it can curl up and grab it’s back feet with its front, thereby negating the fact that its front feet have nothing to grasp…… He didn’t laugh, but it was funny stuff to the rest of us. Very funny stuff.

Tim

Well What you can do is throw a blanket over it so it will calm down some and cant see wahts going on. this is not the most corect way to dispatch a animal but i have heard of peolpe putting the cage in a big plastic bag and hooking it to the exghast of a vehicle and letting it run. iam not saying this is how you should go about doing this but it works

ive never had a skunk spray me, but ive never had one in a live trap, so idk.

My Dad has caught several skunks in a live trap and like Timmy said he covers the trap with a blanket and has yet to get sprayed. Shoot me a PM if you would like to know how he disposes of the skunk.