The Great Skunk Hunter

My father didn’t want to be a killer. He didn’t ask to be and I bet he never thought he would be. However, sometimes a man is pushed too far and must defend his home against aggressors. Unfortunately freedom from tyranny and trespass comes with a price… and a high body count.

Oh, he killed them. He killed them all.

Ron Damm, my father, has kind eyes. He’s an honest man that believes in hard work and building a good life. Ron Damm is not a violent man. Unless you count the time he angrily bludgeoned a camper roof-vent he was repairing with a hammer in 1985, I would say he has a relatively clean record where rage related violence is concerned. Who among us hasn’t been antagonized by those camper roof-vents?

Ron lives with my mother Sharon in Kittitas, Washington, in a home they moved to in 1976. They have transformed it from a nice, modest rambler into a gardener’s paradise with a lawn that would make a PGA greens keeper jealous. Their yards, front and back, are beautiful in different ways. The front is fairly formal with a slight slope, lush green lawn meticulously maintained and decorative berms with seasonal flowers and plants. The back of the house is a relaxing country garden with more lovely lawn, sitting areas, a gardeners shed, fruit trees, fountains and a bountiful vegetable garden. You know, it’s so amazingly sweet, diabetics aren’t allowed to look at it.

Several years ago they made the decision to purchase the small single-wide trailer across the street. They did this so they could rent it out to nice people needing a place to stay, and also so that they would never have to hear the phrase, “LOOK OUT JERRY! HE’S GOT A KNIFE!” screamed in the middle of the night ever again.

It was across the street from the house at the rental trailer that my father first found himself face to face with destiny. He had gone over to shut the water off at a standpipe around the back of the trailer when he ran into trouble. He turned a corner just in time to see a skunk scurry toward him.

Empowered with the adrenal overdrive that is only produced by a skunk or snake-headed-bear-dragon (the second of which has not been proven to exist), my father began to swivel and beat feet to get away. As he turned, he saw more, by the tool shed and another, and another. He was surrounded.

Ron’s brand new hip got him across the street in a hurry, and I imagine that he did what any rational man would do in that situation: Grab as many guns and as much ammunition as you can, gather your spouse and dog, and barricade yourself in the bathroom tub until the first rays of daylight force the unholy nocturnal zebra-cats back into their putrid dens.

Ron called a professional animal trapper to take care of the situation. The trapper came and set some…traps. The next day, the three traps had caught three skunks. It also generated quite a bill. As everyone knows, when you hire a trapper to end your skunk problem, you pay by the skunk. I don’t know if dad asked whether there was a customer loyalty program or if the trapper had a punch card which would entitle dad to a free skunk removal after paying for six skunks of equal or greater value.

The trapper explained that this wasn’t the end. More skunks would come and the trapper explained to my father that he would never know peace until this skunk business was finished. Taking pity on my father’s pocketbook, the professional taught my father the ways of live trapping the prairie penguins.

(I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be giving the skunks cutesy names like “prairie penguins”. They are dangerous animals and the minute you don’t respect them…)

With just enough information to get him in a whole lot of trouble, Ron began looking to purchase his own traps in the ultimate Do-It-Yourself gamble. I first learned of this skunk business when my father came to visit me in mid-June of that year. Dad had come to visit me in Western Washington and asked if we could stop by the hardware store and look for skunk traps. Of course we could. Whose curiosity isn’t aroused by a request like that?

As we looked at the various types of critter traps at my favorite local hardware store, I noticed one that I thought was a no-brainer. It was big enough for a skunk and it was the only one that was completely enclosed. However, Ron Damm likes a deal almost as much as he likes a skunk-free yard, so he was looking at a wire cage trap that was about $10 cheaper.

“You know dad, I’d be happy to spring for the difference if you want to get the enclosed trap and avoid getting sprayed every single time you trap a skunk,” I offered as he kept staring at the wire trap.

“Oh… I think this will be just fine,” Dad said back to me politely.

“Really? Because I see a possible flaw in the plan,” I chuckled.

“Oh, the trapper says the roof of the cage is low enough that the skunk can’t raise its tail high enough to spray,” dad said.

“Would this be the same trapper you are no longer paying to remove skunks? Did he give you this information before or after you told him you were going to do this on you own?”

“Your mother heard that they can’t spray if their tail is wet,” he said, avoiding the question. “In fact, she volunteered to use the spray nozzle on the hose to wet the tail down while I went and got it.”

After he laughed about that, I knew he had thought this through and had a system and he let me know nicely that I was asking stupid questions and that I’d best back off before I insult both of us.

He returned to Kittitas and the capturing commenced. Dad called me after he caught his first skunks and I immediately asked if he’d been sprayed. He hadn’t. And so the next logical question was what do you do with a caged angry skunk?

Before I answer that, let’s talk about reasons skunks are not good to have in residential areas. The obvious reason is the smell. Apart from being so unbelievably awful that it can induce vomiting, it sticks around for a while. A skunk spray has a range of up to 20 feet and heaven help you if you get hit. It’s an oily substance that immediately absorbs into your pores of your skin and hair on your body and is darn near impossible to wash off. Tomato juice just makes you smell like skunk and tomatoes. The tomato juice seems to work because your nose has literally been knocked out by the pungent aroma and other nose receptors that are still working pick up the smell of tomato juice. So it doesn’t work. The person who uses tomato juice just thinks it works.

The other big reason why skunks are considered dangerous is that they have been known to carry rabies. Rabies is a disease that is nearly 100% lethal to humans. It makes animals aggressive and much stronger than they usually are due to rabies’ effect on the adrenal glands of the animal carriers. If a human is bitten and infected, unless they are treated for it within about 72 hours, that human is going to die, and their obituary will say that the person was killed by a skunk. It wouldn’t matter if the person that died had cured cancer, walked on Mars or sold more number #1 records of all time, the one thing everyone will know about that person is that they died of a skunk bite. Don’t believe me? How many records did Elvis Presley sell? Okay, now how did he die?

Skunk bites do happen. In Maryland, a skunk wandered into a Jimmy Buffet inspired Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant and bit a lady on the leg. Right in the middle of happy hour, this skunk wanders into a loud and rowdy theme restaurant for some unknown reason and bites a lady, a lady who will forever be forced to tell the skunk bite story to every person she meets. When someone asks about her they’ll say something like: “Is Jennifer coming to the party? Not the redhead Jennifer, ‘skunk bite’ Jennifer?” At any rate, they caught the skunk on the end of a pole, took it out into the parking lot and shot it like Sonny Corleone. It had rabies.

Ron didn’t want to do what had to be done next, and yes it had to be done for safety reasons. State law says that if you trap them, because of the danger they cause, they must be put down. So although it certainly wasn’t the animals’ fault for showing up where they did, and just acting like skunks normally act, they presented a clear and present danger to the community, and Ron Damm wasn’t going to stand for it. What he was really afraid of was that my parents’ little haggis of a dog, Zoe the bichon frise, would get sprayed in the backyard and run in the doggie door and roll all over the couch and carpet to get the stink off. If that happened, they would have just burned the house down and moved.

Dad had to find the most humane way to euthanize the creatures, as relocating them was out of the question. He built a device that would allow him to put a cage into a sealed box and then pump in carbon monoxide gas from his pickup tailpipe through a rigged up vacuum cleaner hose. Dad would let the truck run for twenty minutes and the skunks would fall asleep and not wake up… or so he hoped every single time he opened the lid to dispose of the body.

I know it’s awful, but you have to understand, my father wasn’t killing the cartoon French sexual predator skunk or the big-eyed Bambi buddy skunk. Those skunks aren’t real and never got rabies (Though I think that was a subplot in Bambi 4: Return of Thumper). Dad was the only one doing something about this community danger.

And there was danger. Kittitas may not have had a theme restaurant named for a mediocre 70’s throwback, but it did have plenty of skunks. That meant plenty of opportunities for pets and humans to be bitten.

Not everyone was in favor of the skunk solution. They let my father know it too. They wanted my father to let the skunks go. I thought it took quite a bit of restraint for my father, who was only doing this for the good of the neighborhood, to not offer to let them loose under those people’s houses. People did not understand how huge a problem this was. Never before had this many skunks been seen in that part of town. The two or three blocks were positively overrun by the little creatures and nobody knew why… yet.

Another man across the street from my parents didn’t care for the trapping either. Although they were dead and triple garbage-bagged, you could smell them a bit until the sanitation truck drove off with them. The smell was triggering a sense memory of the TWO times he had shot a skunk in the head, only to be sprayed by the dying skunk on both occasions. THAT I understood.

I invite anyone wanting to make a case for skunks in a neighborhood vs. safety to watch the film Old Yeller… all the way to the end. Don’t shut it off when Tommy Kirk raises the rifle. I want you to see the ugly face of what rabies is. Poor Old Yeller.

The summer went on and Dad caught skunk after skunk. In my mind I picture a music montage sequence of scenes of dad trapping, then gassing and bagging skunks fading in and out over the top of each other with numbers advancing with each quick scene.

I was with him one afternoon as we put a trap in the box and attached the hose to the top. Dad had gotten pretty methodical but he wasn’t enjoying it. There’s an oddness to the whole situation of having to rid your neighborhood of a rather peculiar animal and that it has to happen so often that you become streamlined in your methods and approach. That was where Dad’s head was the whole time. Few people grow up thinking they will ever own a skunk killing machine. Dad had become a little calloused after killing so many. Skunk twenty-something was in the box. After the box was double checked, Dad just started walking across the street and I had to trot a couple steps to catch up with him. I didn’t know why we had put the skunk in the kill box but Dad didn’t start the pickup engine to deliver the dose of deadly gas.

“Do you think your mother is ready for lunch?” Dad asked me casually as we were halfway across the street. Then he pulled out his keychain, held it over his shoulder and without looking back, pushed the remote starter button to activate his pickup truck’s engine. It was like the final scene to every action movie with the star of the film pushing the detonator to some gigantic bomb and they just stroll away from the mushrooming clouds of fire like it was just the next thing to do on a list that involved groceries, doctor appointment, destroy terrorist headquarters and have lunch with wife. He didn’t mean it to look like that, but it was strangely impressive.

Dad didn’t just catch skunks. Other critters would wander into the traps too. He caught two quail, three cats, their dog Zoe twice and a raccoon.

Now raccoons are very dangerous little buggers, and if skunks might carry rabies, raccoons are rotten with rabies. How likely are raccoons to have rabies? Well, let’s put it this way, if the animal kingdom had a Red Cross blood center, raccoons not only wouldn’t be allowed to donate, but any animal that had slept with a raccoon would be turned away as well.

Raccoons may look cute, like the one President Calvin Coolidge’s wife kept as a pet, but those days are long gone. They are mean and vicious when approached and that’s when they don’t have rabies. The ones with rabies come after YOU and they are super strong to boot. They are not to be messed with.

Dad’s first thought was to let it go. Dad called me at work to tell me he had caught one and I knew he was serious about how angry the raccoon was when dad put a full two seconds in between the words “Ticked……..off,” to really drive it home. Luckily the little bugger wouldn’t let dad get close enough to trip the switch or that thing would have been all over dad like a hobo on a bologna sandwich.

That summer, my father had trapped 38 skunks, in an area that is typically skunk free. One skunk weighed in at over 26 pounds.

These 38 skunks didn’t have to die. It turns out that they were lured into the area by people who wanted to feed them. It started out with a few skunks stealing outdoor cat food, but nearby neighbors thought the skunks were cute and liked to feed them and watch them play. The odd coincidence is that their irresponsible need to watch the cute skunks scurry around for food was partially responsible for the skunks being destroyed. When the humans stopped luring the animals in, the traps stopped filling. When the traps stopped filling, Dad stopped killing.

Dad’s exploits had garnered him attention as the number one skunk trapper in the land. He was known far and wide as the great skunk hunter. And as all humble and reluctant heroes are, Ron was a good sport about it, knowing that although it was a grisly job, if called upon again to trap the wild pole cat, he would answer that call, and that’s the Damm Truth.