Animal Antics

My father-in-law constantly waged war with the skunks that lived on his farm. He heard somewhere that if you aimed a jet of cold water at the skunks' spray mechanism, the skunk will be unable to spray. Confident that he'd found the ultimate weapon, safe for himself and non-harmful to the skunk, he tried it out at the first opportunity. He used the trigger nozzle on his hose and found the stream of water forced the skunk off with no bad after-effects. Cheerfully he used the same method with success the following night. On the third evening he came face to face with a particularly feisty skunk.

The skunk kept marching towards him, stopping and stomping his paws in anger instead of taking aim. The skunk was about six feet away when he turned to spray. Confidently, my father-in-law pulled the trigger on the nozzle only to discover, that since he'd last used the hose, someone had turned the nozzle to spray!

Do you know how much tomato juice it takes to remove skunk smell from a grown man?

A neighbor came home one day to find that a skunk had taken posession of the house via the cat door. Uncertain on how to persuade the skunk to leave peacefully, she called the local animal control. They arrived and after surveying the situation, decided that using a tranquilizer gun was the proper approach. WRONG!!!

It only took about 2 weeks and a large sum of money to rid the house of the odor while the family resided at a local motel at the city's expense.

Deer seem to be everywhere now - even in the city. Many people think they are cute and feed them, which isn't a great idea since people food isn't wonderful for wild animals. Sugar, fat and salt are as bad for wild animals as they are for people and just as addictive. Even apples can become addictive to deer as illustrated by what happened to my husband on our family farm.

His father had picked lots of apples in the fall and many had wintered over but early summer had arrived, many of the apples were spoiling and the local deer had arrived on the scene with their new crop of fawns. Those cute little spotted fawns had become comfortable around the farm and looked forward to the daily apple sorting operation. As the apples were sorted, the spoiled ones were thrown onto the compost pile and the deer had noticed. Every day they came for their apple snack.

The new apples were ripening on the trees and some were ready to eat. My husband loves apples and had a couple in his pocket for a snack later that day. As he was walking towards the apple shed he felt like someone was following him. When he glanced over his shoulder, a fawn was walking closely behind and reaching out to steal the apple from his pocket. That was the moment that my husband decided that the deer were getting WAY too friendly.

Since that time we have moved to Colorado Springs and live on the west side of town, near the mountains. We frequently see deer around the apartment complex and last summer we had five does that raised six fawns and hung out on the lawn most days. They were a little wary of the kids but adults could walk by and the deer usually wouldn't even bother to get up.