I love skunks

I don’t mean to anthropomorphize here (spell check doesn’t know it, I know it but no way I am going to try to say it out loud) but skunks are morons.

Skunks rule: they score a solid 10/10 on the cuteness scale, they eat bugs that would otherwise eat your budding flower and fruit seedlings, they look totally awesome and they have a self preservation defense mechanism which you and I as humans discreetly crave.  Come on, admit it, we have a preternatural instinct to shit on that which we don’t like- for crying out loud it was beautifully articulated in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I am just saying I love skunks.

But man they must be dumber than rocks, for all the trouble they manage to get into that even your average poorly-bred three-year old human can avoid.  I read on the internet that there is a movement urging Yoplait® to change the design of their yogurt cups since so many skunks- around the world! - manage to get their heads stuck inside them while they are grazing our trash cans and dumpsters. I’ve freed a handful of them from yogurt cups over the years and I simply assume they trot away looking for their next slurp of blueberry & vanilla backwash.

These little black and white idiots apparently also are sports fans.  Where I work, our skunks have miles and miles of wildland space to forage, and yet, in only the last year I have found them completely entangled in field-goal netting at the local high school football field, a street hockey net over at the state park and this morning bound up in some kind of baseball backstop net inside this one lady’s garage.

I rolled up to the garage this morning and the lady was waiting for me.  I think I said something like this was my second skunk in netting in 2 weeks.

“Did the net survive?”

I thought she meant the skunk, and as I rifled through my tool box for wire cutters, paramedic shears, nutro-cal and a tongue depressor I explained how of course I was able to transport it to a local wildlife rehabilitation center to make sure it was rehydrated, its laceration injuries were treated and it was released back to the wild shortly thereafter.

“No.  I asked, did the netting survive? We just bought this baseball backstop and it cost $XX.00!”

“The netting never survives. Ever.”  (Solid eye-contact too- she got the point.)

I grabbed a blankie from one of my truck’s kennels and headed into the garage.

Where I work, skunks are like the second highest creature on the county health department’s rabies list.  Right under bats.  When I first stumbled my way into this job, I dealt with skunks at more than just arm’s length- I used the longest catch pole in the tool section, and destroyed more pairs of bullet-proof welder’s gloves (we call them raptor gloves, sounds cooler) than our budget allowed for.  Over time, I realized something.

Skunks- especially the babies, which most commonly reveal themselves to be retards-  are pretty much docile creatures. They deploy their God-given self-defense juice when they need to, and often.  But when they get into trouble, and by the time someone like me finds them, they are simply gassed out. Wrong phrase: they still spray.  But their energy level is diminished, they are low on blood sugar & water, and for whatever reason, they can’t bite through my cool crack-head frisking gloves I saw on COPS last year and ordered on-line during the very next commercial break.

I cut the shit out of the lady’s baseball netting...  and wrapped my putrid-smelling project into a sweet zebra-striped blankie, swabbed some nutro-cal onto its cute little tongue and shoved it into a bush in her back yard.

My boss kicked me out of the animal shelter when I got back to do some paperwork, apparently I got more of the little guy’s fragrance on my uniform than I thought and was making the rest of the staff sick.  Also, I had lunch with my partner later and she made me get us a table outside.  Whatever, The Bride’s not home yet and The Dog seems to like me more than usual.  (The gloves are in the trash can in the side yard.)