Welcome to the first edition of Adventures of Animal Trappers! We will be posting REAL stories weekly. Subscribe and stay tuned and share our stories with your friends!
So Trapper Jordan and I arrive at an undisclosed location (Los Angeles home) for a crawlspace inspection for an unknown animal. I don’t know why, but nine times out of ten an unknown animal happens to be an eager skunk. So we get in our trapper gear (coveralls), grab some essentials: mask, flashlight, snare, net and gloves and proceed under the house to look for an unwanted tenant that this owner would like evicted. We see the usual: droppings, nesting, hairs, grease-marks, footprints, etc… We don’t see anything for the first twenty minutes or so. This is a large home by the way with a lot of ground to cover and it’s about 6:30 pm. We turn to each other and ask if we’d spotted anything and we hear something behind us. We both look back, flashlight in hand pointed at where the noise came from and there are three skunks staring at us. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Not one but three? We end up staring at a team of skunks for what felt like forever.
We didn’t want them to spray under our customer’s house, as this would make it a very uncomfortable place to live for anyone. It was two on three so the odds aren’t in our favor. Then again, they never are when it comes to skunks. Trapper Jordan slowly reaches for his snare to get it into position knowing that one sudden move will probably set off the triple threat. I had a net on me and at the time I didn’t think it was going to be very effective for skunk removal. It was an open net. Which means, I’m definitely going to get sprayed in the face if I happen to net anything. Knowing Jordan I was confident in my decision to kind of hold back with the net and do whatever I needed to do to help Jordan.
Trapper Jordan was able to extend the loop of the snare right next to the mother. After a couple of readjustments, Trapper Jordan had the loop around her head. Always a good thing. Now the tough part. In successfully snaring an animal you want to always get the front legs in the loop. This way you’re not choking the animal. Jordan slides each leg in one at a time with the animal still in a relatively calm state. At this point, the other two skunks are long gone as they sneaked through the crawl space hatch we entered from. But that didn’t bother us. We knew if we get the mother, the other two should be trapped very soon. All Jordan has to do now is pull and he gets the skunk. He pulls the line at the end of the snare to tighten the loop and the animal is snared. Now, all we have to do is crawl back out and transfer her to a trap. We properly put her away safely and go out to set two humane traps for the others. We were able to remove the mother humanely without spraying and had very happy customers. We actually caught the other two a couple of nights later. After we removed the other two skunks and the traps we did animal-proofing repairs on the home. Our customers were very happy and invited us to stay at their barbecue. It doesn’t get better than that! More trapping stories to come!
