The Skunk Whisperer

Normally I ignore the business related facebook pleas filling up the Homegrown Evolution in box, but one came today that I had to grant some free publicity. We’ve all heard of horse whisperers and TV’s dog whisperer. You may have even heard of the chicken whisperer. Step aside for the . . . skunk whisperer, a “no-kill, no-trap” pest control company based in Oklahoma which seems to consist of at least two skunk whisperers, each with their own cartoon avatar and territory.

From what I can tell from the Skunk Whisperer’s website, www.totalwildlifecontrol.com, they seem to practice a common sense integrated pest management (IPM) approach to critter control. In other words, work first on eliminating habitat. Studies have shown that if you trap and try to relocate animals such as skunks and raccoons, you’re just making room for a another one to take their place. If you poison them you risk killing predators up the food chain, not to mention pets and humans. And poisoned mammals have a nasty tendency to crawl into a wall to die leaving a stench that lasts for months.

As a chicken owner I’m sensitive to the raccoon menace. Following the IPM approach, just like the Skunk Whisperer, I made sure the chicken coop was well fortified and I got rid of a water feature that was a nightly raccoon attractant. Our Doberman is the icing on the anti-raccoon cake.

It’s easy to see how preventing points of entry into our homes is one important part of fending off critters. Judging from the voluminous photos on the Skunk Whisperer’s facebook page they focus on screening out critter access. The beehive relocation I helped with recently and the one I’m going to do in the spring are both because hives made their way into buildings with gaps in the woodwork. Close up the gaps and you exclude most non Homo sapiens. And can we please stop leaving pet food outside?

Possum whispering and bare handed trappin’.

It turns out that the Skunk Whisperer also uses a technique I just tried. The contractor who did our foundation work left the crawlspace access door open. I’m pretty sure something took up residence down there. If I just closed the access door I risked having a critter die under the house, or possibly killing someone’s cat. Instead, I got a cheap raccoon-sized trap and rigged it up as a one-way door. Critters can exit, but they can’t come back in. It seemed to work–the trap sprung and something either left or tried to get in and couldn’t. Now I can close off the access door and not worry about the scent of death wafting up through the house. Here’s what my skunk trap-out looks like–excuse the bad picture and remember that it’s not a trap as the exit end is always open:

I cut a board to fit around the trap-out and nailed it to the corners of the crawl space opening.

The next step is to get a cartoon of myself and I’ll be making the big money.

Here’s the Skunk Whisperer removing the Pepsi machine raccoons. As he put it, “They’d put money in and a raccoon hand would come out.”

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5 Comments

  1. cool. We have a company around here called “critter getter”. We had a family of raccoons under our apartment. He used one of those one-way doors to let the mother out, then climbed under the building to get the babies. Then he released them all in the near-by forest. It was cool to watch.

  2. Our raccoons use the backyard for a highway, which is fine, except that I’m planning a large garden back there, so will be providing the food part. Then we have a skunk that passes through occasionally, and for awhile there were three raccoons living in the giant sweet gum out in the front yard. I think fixing the fence will be a good start, but if they continue to show up after that, I don’t know what to do. Buy a .22? I dunno….

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