What the...SKUNK!

So I never imagined I would be writing about a skunk in my blog. But, I have to admit that this little animal has been on my mind so much for the last week, that I had to document what a terrible experience this has been.

As a property manager, I deal with weird situations. BUT THIS TAKES THE CAKE...BY FAR! I had a tenant call me about a week ago with a "big problem." She said that she thought she had a skunk in her house. I told her we'd be right over to check out the "skunk." I secretly thought, "hmmm, I wonder what it really is, there's no way it's a skunk." So, I sent Dan to look. He called me immediately to say that it looks like a skunk, but it has spots. After a few minutes, and some help from Google, we found that our varmint was a "spotted skunk."

I wanted to see it for myself. So I got brave and went into the house. It was waiting for me in the hallway. I had my camera ready and snapped a few pictures. I decided to say, (which by the way I don't know what I was thinking!), "come here little guy." To my surprise it RAN straight at me, as if it was obeying my request. Of course I FREAKED out and ran away from it.

We are VERY lucky that we haven't been sprayed...yet. It loves this house. You might be wondering: A-why doesn't she call a pest control company? Well, let me tell ya, out of the phone book, only ONE company deals with skunks and they are in St. George. By the way, we finally got someone over there, and have set THREE traps. Nothing has worked. It's a SMART SKUNK. B-why doesn't she call animal control? Well, animal control doesn't deal with skunks either (if you can get them to answer the phone, which takes ALL DAY to get through) C-why doesn't she kill it? Well, at this point I'd love to, but spotted skunks are supposedly an endangered species, so I think it's against the law to kill them.

Well, today we found that it had been hording food into its den. We found lots of chips back behind the oven, under the dishwasher...etc. So, it had a stash of food, so that explains why it's not hungry enough to go into the traps for the food.

Dan went into the crawl space and found the little guy about a foot from his face, mind you. Luckily he didn't get sprayed, but he ran away and now we can't find him again!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHH!

If anyone has any suggestions, please, please, let me know. I've tried cat food and tuna fish. But so far, all we have caught in the traps is a CAT!