How to kill a skunk without making it spray you - There is no definite way to kill a skunk without it spraying. The only way to kill it without a risk to you is for you to be a good distance away. This usually means shooting the skunk with a rifle.
If you’re a homeowner, you probably don’t want to be discharging firearms in your yard unless you don’t have any neighbors. Beyond the use of a gun, killing a skunk means all the muscles in the body will relax, including the ones that control the scent
glands. While spraying doesn’t happen all the time, it does happen a good amount of the time. You have better chances of not being sprayed if you capture the animal alive and then relocate it off the property. Trapping doesn’t have to be a daunting task.
If you know a little bit about skunks, you know they aren’t overly aggressive or terribly shy. This makes the pretty easy to trap. If you purchase a cage trap down at your local garden center, you can set the device up in the yard where you’ve been seeing
the skunks. Cover the top and the sides with a tarp. This eliminates the scary visual stimuli once the skunk is trapped inside and will also prevent you from being sprayed.
You can also try poison to kill skunks. However, it's not legal, and it comes with many risks. It's also an asshole redneck tactic. The use of poisons is extremly inhumane and painful for the animal. And as often as not dogs or cats in your area will
eat it by mistake. Here are various poisons you could try:
Anticoagulant (rat poison): Includes warfarin, difenacoum, brodifacoum, bromadiolone and others. These are primarily used to kill rats and mice, and are called rodenticides. Anticoagulants damage capillaries, and cause internal bleeding.
This process takes a few days. It is very painful for the animal. In the final phase, the animal dies of hypovolemic circulatory shock.
Antifreeze - Ethylene glycol: Yeah, you've probably heard that you can leave out a bowl of antifreeze and kill dogs or cats or skunks. The liver metabolizes ethylene glycol into glycolate and oxalate, which cause extensive cellular damage in various tissues, especially the kidneys, but across many different organs. So after an initial stage of nausea and vomiting and muscle twitches and stuff, kidney, liver, even heart failure cause death, usually in about 24 hours.
Bromethalin: This is another type of rat poison. Attacks the nervous system, and causes limb ataxia, seizures, hyperthennia, and finally death after 36 hours or so.
Cholecalciferol: Another type of rat poison, it produces hypercalcemia, which results in systemic calcification of soft tissue, leading to renal failure and death in 24-36 hours.
Strychnine: causes muscular convulsions and eventually death through asphyxia or sheer exhaustion.
A better method is to shoot the skunk or kill it with a lethal body grip trap. In either case, there's really no chance of getting sprayed. Of course, the best tactic of all is to simply trap and relocate the skunk alive. It's actually a lot easier
than it sounds, and sprays are very rare. If you know what you're doing, you'll never get sprayed.
Go back to my main
skunk control page or my
how to keep skunks out of your yard page. If you got sprayed, read my
how to remove skunk odor from fabric, which also
has instructions for your sprayed dog.
