![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dying Skunk
Apr. 2nd, 2020 11:46 amWhen my husband and I moved into my house three years ago after long stints of living with my parents between apartments, it felt amazing (still does!) to wake up under my own roof and to have my own yard. One of my many headstrong notions when I got here was to provide a feeding and watering station for the wide variety of northern Illinois animals who frequent my yard. Within weeks of the move, I was feeding and watering everyone from the raccoons evicted from our fixer-upper’s attic to sweat bees to the occasional fox on the move.
In exchange for the regular grub and drink, the animals provided us with plenty of visual entertainment, of course. Additionally, the feral cats unwittingly policed my raised garden beds of lettuce: I was the only person in the suburbs hauling garbage bags full of fresh lettuce out of my beds during nearly three months of temperate 2019. Elsewhere in the suburbs, rabbits ensured that didn’t happen. From the beginning, there was a sense of a relationship being built between me and the birds, squirrels, bugs, cats, raccoons, opossums, and skunks.
After only three years, the garden is barely established. It isn’t yet the sanctuary for animals (including human animals) I intend it to be. Nevertheless, when a skunk came into my yard to die three days ago, it wasn’t the first time an animal had sought shelter in my yard. Approximately five seconds after the garden shed was built, raccoons and skunks started living and hiding under it. My husband became concerned about this, but I was adamant that as long as I live here, let it be. The shed is the epicenter of the yard for animals at this point — it is where the animals eat and close to where they hide out storms and terrible weather.
For nearly a year, we’ve noticed one skunk who did a strange dance out by the feeding station, circling around, doing the skunk version of backflips. This was not mating behavior. The skunk, who dragged herself into my yard to die a few days ago, most likely had distemper. Distemper is similar to rabies. It is always fatal. The poor skunk wanted shelter and had dragged herself to the feeding station in a last-ditch effort to stay alive.
My husband was in the yard, so he picked up the twitching, flailing skunk with a shovel and put her out in some brush near the alley behind our house. At first, I wasn’t happy he did this, but when I realized distemper is spread through feces and bites, I thought it was for the best because the animals congregate in fairly close quarters near the shed, and I think nowadays most of us are acutely aware of social distancing when it comes to combatting viruses.
This is where I went wrong. We both knew the skunk was not going to live from looking at her, but we left her by the fence in hopes nature would take its course. Nature had slower plans. I kept checking the skunk throughout the day. Though her flailing slowed down, by the evening, she was still going, having dragged herself about six feet across the fence’s length in her agony during the long day. During the day, I called half a dozen different public institutions that one would think could have come and dispatched the skunk, ending her misery. Shockingly, even with the help of the Animal Help Now app, there wasn’t a damn person on government payroll willing to put down a skunk with a contagious virus. This begs the question why my tax dollars fund the Department of Natural Resources in the first place, and I’m mad enough still to write them a scathing review, but at any rate, my mistake was in not hiring a private service to euthanize the skunk the same day she wandered into my yard to die.
The issue was mostly about money. Because a skunk is considered a “nuisance” animal, and because skunks can spray, the charge was $150. In hindsight, I didn’t want to upset my husband by spending $150 during a time he has been laid off from his job, but then I realized my own hypocrisy at dropping $30 every few days on takeout in an effort to keep a new vegan restaurant in my area alive. I went to bed that night and slept fitfully and badly, hoping the skunk would die a natural death.
I got up the next morning and went outside. No such luck. She was still twitching and worse yet, raising her head. Distemper had made her into a skunk zombie. The look of it reminded me of the final stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, when the brain is gone and the body clings to life. I immediately called a private animal control service. A guy named Frank came out and ended the skunk’s life on the spot. I won’t say how, because people in the suburbs can often be complete asshats. It took two tries. The poor creature was finally off to the next phase of incarnation after a forty-hour ordeal. My only consolation was that I had surely shortened what could have been an even more obscenely extended death.
The thing that upsets me about my own behavior is that I kowtowed to financial and social pressure not to save an animal. A little over a year ago, my reclusive aunt died, and I braved social/physical/mental hell and high water to save her two cats, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to muster up my usual fire to dispatch a little skunk. Yes, it’s frustrating that government services failed me. That said, as I have gotten older, I have realized that most people in this culture shut down when it comes to dealing with animals. Our relationship with them is deeply fractured, and there’s nothing like a wounded animal wandering into one’s yard to remind us of that. Like many, I have had to start from scratch when it has come to how I think about animals, and ignoring the plight of the skunk for nearly forty hours was a nasty reminder of my old habits.
Compassion and bravery are traits we humans think we can pass on when it comes to animals. We are raised thinking they exist to serve us, entertain us, clothe us, and feed us, when the truth is closer to what Alice Walker said:
“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
Inasmuch as they were not created for me, I believe that all humans have an innate responsibility to act as animal stewards and protectors. Most of us shirk that responsibility our entire lives. Sadly, in order to get the job done for the skunk, I had to go against the grain. Just like the time when I rescued the cats, it quickly became abundantly clear that I was the only person willing to act like an adult where the skunk was concerned. Everyone else, including the state services which are supposed to do jobs like this, shrunk away in cowardice, leaving the skunk’s fate to chance. This was eerily similar to what happened when my aunt died, as nobody else considered going to her place to get the cats who would have frozen to death within a day or two if they weren’t attacked and killed by other animals.
Our relationships with non-human animals have been terrible since the day some dude decided to get a party together to spear a mammoth. Our despair and haplessness manifests itself in myriad ways. There are the sick, well-intentioned efforts of those who try to keep pets alive at all costs, making them go through hellish surgeries and veterinary treatments because they can’t bear to allow Fido or Fluffy to die a few years ahead of the ideal schedule. Worse than them are those who buy or adopt an animal and then abandon them because they are tired of the responsibility or because they birth human kids or because they move. Several of my neighborhood’s ferals started out as someone’s house cat. The primary reason I chose not to have children is because I didn’t want to end up with the horror of regretting it. When I adopted my cat, I knew I was signing on for no less than 16 - 23 years. The choice to abandon is just as bad with a non-human animal because neither baby nor puppy can understand what is going on or fend for themselves. And that’s just our relationship with pets…
Anyway, the poor skunk is gone now and bless her little soul as she makes her way through the planes, only to return again. I hope to see her again soon.
In exchange for the regular grub and drink, the animals provided us with plenty of visual entertainment, of course. Additionally, the feral cats unwittingly policed my raised garden beds of lettuce: I was the only person in the suburbs hauling garbage bags full of fresh lettuce out of my beds during nearly three months of temperate 2019. Elsewhere in the suburbs, rabbits ensured that didn’t happen. From the beginning, there was a sense of a relationship being built between me and the birds, squirrels, bugs, cats, raccoons, opossums, and skunks.
After only three years, the garden is barely established. It isn’t yet the sanctuary for animals (including human animals) I intend it to be. Nevertheless, when a skunk came into my yard to die three days ago, it wasn’t the first time an animal had sought shelter in my yard. Approximately five seconds after the garden shed was built, raccoons and skunks started living and hiding under it. My husband became concerned about this, but I was adamant that as long as I live here, let it be. The shed is the epicenter of the yard for animals at this point — it is where the animals eat and close to where they hide out storms and terrible weather.
For nearly a year, we’ve noticed one skunk who did a strange dance out by the feeding station, circling around, doing the skunk version of backflips. This was not mating behavior. The skunk, who dragged herself into my yard to die a few days ago, most likely had distemper. Distemper is similar to rabies. It is always fatal. The poor skunk wanted shelter and had dragged herself to the feeding station in a last-ditch effort to stay alive.
My husband was in the yard, so he picked up the twitching, flailing skunk with a shovel and put her out in some brush near the alley behind our house. At first, I wasn’t happy he did this, but when I realized distemper is spread through feces and bites, I thought it was for the best because the animals congregate in fairly close quarters near the shed, and I think nowadays most of us are acutely aware of social distancing when it comes to combatting viruses.
This is where I went wrong. We both knew the skunk was not going to live from looking at her, but we left her by the fence in hopes nature would take its course. Nature had slower plans. I kept checking the skunk throughout the day. Though her flailing slowed down, by the evening, she was still going, having dragged herself about six feet across the fence’s length in her agony during the long day. During the day, I called half a dozen different public institutions that one would think could have come and dispatched the skunk, ending her misery. Shockingly, even with the help of the Animal Help Now app, there wasn’t a damn person on government payroll willing to put down a skunk with a contagious virus. This begs the question why my tax dollars fund the Department of Natural Resources in the first place, and I’m mad enough still to write them a scathing review, but at any rate, my mistake was in not hiring a private service to euthanize the skunk the same day she wandered into my yard to die.
The issue was mostly about money. Because a skunk is considered a “nuisance” animal, and because skunks can spray, the charge was $150. In hindsight, I didn’t want to upset my husband by spending $150 during a time he has been laid off from his job, but then I realized my own hypocrisy at dropping $30 every few days on takeout in an effort to keep a new vegan restaurant in my area alive. I went to bed that night and slept fitfully and badly, hoping the skunk would die a natural death.
I got up the next morning and went outside. No such luck. She was still twitching and worse yet, raising her head. Distemper had made her into a skunk zombie. The look of it reminded me of the final stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, when the brain is gone and the body clings to life. I immediately called a private animal control service. A guy named Frank came out and ended the skunk’s life on the spot. I won’t say how, because people in the suburbs can often be complete asshats. It took two tries. The poor creature was finally off to the next phase of incarnation after a forty-hour ordeal. My only consolation was that I had surely shortened what could have been an even more obscenely extended death.
The thing that upsets me about my own behavior is that I kowtowed to financial and social pressure not to save an animal. A little over a year ago, my reclusive aunt died, and I braved social/physical/mental hell and high water to save her two cats, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to muster up my usual fire to dispatch a little skunk. Yes, it’s frustrating that government services failed me. That said, as I have gotten older, I have realized that most people in this culture shut down when it comes to dealing with animals. Our relationship with them is deeply fractured, and there’s nothing like a wounded animal wandering into one’s yard to remind us of that. Like many, I have had to start from scratch when it has come to how I think about animals, and ignoring the plight of the skunk for nearly forty hours was a nasty reminder of my old habits.
Compassion and bravery are traits we humans think we can pass on when it comes to animals. We are raised thinking they exist to serve us, entertain us, clothe us, and feed us, when the truth is closer to what Alice Walker said:
“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
Inasmuch as they were not created for me, I believe that all humans have an innate responsibility to act as animal stewards and protectors. Most of us shirk that responsibility our entire lives. Sadly, in order to get the job done for the skunk, I had to go against the grain. Just like the time when I rescued the cats, it quickly became abundantly clear that I was the only person willing to act like an adult where the skunk was concerned. Everyone else, including the state services which are supposed to do jobs like this, shrunk away in cowardice, leaving the skunk’s fate to chance. This was eerily similar to what happened when my aunt died, as nobody else considered going to her place to get the cats who would have frozen to death within a day or two if they weren’t attacked and killed by other animals.
Our relationships with non-human animals have been terrible since the day some dude decided to get a party together to spear a mammoth. Our despair and haplessness manifests itself in myriad ways. There are the sick, well-intentioned efforts of those who try to keep pets alive at all costs, making them go through hellish surgeries and veterinary treatments because they can’t bear to allow Fido or Fluffy to die a few years ahead of the ideal schedule. Worse than them are those who buy or adopt an animal and then abandon them because they are tired of the responsibility or because they birth human kids or because they move. Several of my neighborhood’s ferals started out as someone’s house cat. The primary reason I chose not to have children is because I didn’t want to end up with the horror of regretting it. When I adopted my cat, I knew I was signing on for no less than 16 - 23 years. The choice to abandon is just as bad with a non-human animal because neither baby nor puppy can understand what is going on or fend for themselves. And that’s just our relationship with pets…
Anyway, the poor skunk is gone now and bless her little soul as she makes her way through the planes, only to return again. I hope to see her again soon.
