My aunt is a rural mail carrier here in Southern Indiana. I asked her a week or two ago to keep an eye out for fresh road kill for me. I am just getting started and would like to mount a little of everything to see what I like to do and what I dont, and to put some things on the wall of my shop. She makes the perfect "eyes" for me because she covers a lot of roads and because she travels the same roads everyday she knows how long something has sat. Well she calls me last night and says "I saw the prettiest skunk on the side of the road today, you should mount that. It has 2 white stripes down its back and it is really pretty." I tell her "well, I'll have to do some research on the smelly part of it before I drive out there and drag it home. So I read all the great posts and wrte down George's secret smell eliminating potion. I drive out to the skunk and get out of my truck. I can smell the skunk a little but decide this isn't reall that bad. I bend over and roll the little fellow over to get a look at the other side and BAM! The only thing I can compare it to was the CS gas I got hit with a couple times in the Army. CS gas makes your eyes water, your nose run, and it is really hard to breathe. Wow. We should just march into combat with a bunch of skunks asses pointed at the enemy. So anyway, I bagged it (which helped very little) and took it home. I soaked it in the peroxide solution and the smell dissappeared until i rinsed it off. It was getting late so I just zipped it up in a zip lock (which again helped very little) and threw it in the freezer. Guess I'll skin it and try putting just the skin in the peroxide. By the way, after I put it in the back of my truck and gettin back in the front with my wife, she would have made me ride in the back with it except is was about 20 degrees outside. She just held her nose on the way home and soldiered on........
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Sorry, but after posting the above I began to picture using skunks in battle.
"There I was, in my position in the middle of a linear ambush line. In my hands was my newly issued black and white skunk. I made special care, like the rest of the men with me to keep the "safety" on by holding the skunks tail down between its legs. As we waited, I began to hear the rumbling of 20 C-130 aircraft overhead. It was the 75th Ranger Regiment's newly formed Para-skunk outfit. As the aircraft crossed over enemy lines, anti-aircraft fire began to sound in the distance. Shortly thereafter, the guns fell silent. I knew the skunks had parachuted in and began their aromatic assault. I prepared my skunk for I knew the enemy would be coming our way. First we heard the yelling, the the crackling of hundreds of the enemy busting brush with watering eyes and fingers on nose. We waited tensely until we could see the reds of their irritated eyes. The PL gave the signal and we all lifted our respective tails cutting down the enemy in our skunky crossfire. A change in wind direction caused some friendly fire incidents, be the battle was won....."
Sorry, just couldnt help it.
Glad you won the battle and the stinkin Yotes we held in reserve weren't needed.
like really really strong aphrodisiacs that turned people gay on each other, and a couple other really cool ones but they slip my mind right now,
That's funny!
For skunk stench, i use a mixture of baking soada,peroxide and dawn dish soap.....kills skunk smell.....not too sure what it would do for your pelt. any ideas George?
You use the 3% peroxide and there's no harm done to it.
when you get done using it on the skunk,you can start to work descenting your freezer.
That was the last one I will ever do regardless of how much money someone offers. It was a roadkill (refer to the roadkill and taxidermists posts for laughs) and it didn't smell one bit when my uncle brought it over. That's one reason I said I'd do the mount. The other was its back was entirely white, from the nose to the end of the tail. Well, I couldn't get right to skinning it so it went into the freezer. Every time I opened the freezer from that day forward I was reminded I had a skunk to skin. As a matter of fact everyone in the house reminded me too. I finally got to it after months of abuse from the family members, and friends that stopped over after I had opened the freezer door. The day was 85 and muggy and I'm sure everyone in the neighborhood had their windows open for whatever breeze they could find and I proceeded to hang this polecat on the deer pole and skin it out. Now, I'd never skinned one of these before but after many weasels, muskrats, and the like I knew those scent glands were in front of the tail up on the back so I was real careful not to cut into them. I was using a dorsal cut so each gland was on a separate side of the incision. I got by one pretty good and was thinking this wasn't going to be too bad until I started on the opposite side. The problem was it was a roadkill and I think the scent gland on one side was punctured. If not, it expanded when it froze and popped, hence the smell every time I opened the freezer. Them glands were bigger than any other gland I'd seen and wow were they loaded. This yellow goo just started running down the skin from this punctured gland and I got to tell you I had everyone looking out their windows and doors wondering whose dog got twisted up with a skunk. If they didn't know before, they all knew now, that I played with smelly, dead animals. Windows were slammed shut, a few choice words were spoken, only by them of course, I couldn't breath let alone speak. I finally got the thing skinned, after repeated attempts to talk myself out of the project, and dropped it into some tomato juice that the wife seemed to find, or one of the neighbors donated, I can't recall where it came from. I ran the carcass down the road and dropped it into the ditch a long ways from where anyone lived. I let that skin sit in that juice for an hour and then rinsed it good but the smell was still there. You would have thought that I'd be used to it by now but it was still making my eyes water pretty good. So I placed it into a plastic bag and threw it back in the freezer until another day when I might be able to see slightly better. I finally got the thing mounted and took a third place ribbon in the professional division at one of the NY shows. During the process of pickling, degreasing, tanning, and mounting the only time that smell went away was when it was finished and dry. It still adorns my uncle's game room but to this day every time I look at it I'm reminded of the stink these things carry with them.
There was one day that I came across a kit skunk on the side of the road trying to climb a hill and I thought it might be neat to get it and see if I could have it descented for a pet but those little one's carry just as strong odor as the big ones which I found out the hard way as I tried to get it into a box for transporting. Needless to say the box stayed there too as I wished the little bugger good day and watched it waddle off through watering eyes.