If I’d heard of someone paying $100 to have urine sprayed around their yard when I was in high school, I would have laughed out loud. The boys I went to school with would have done it for free after a few beers, made a contest out of it. Now I am the someone paying the $100. It’s not for your run of the mill urine but for predator urine. I don’t ask how they come by it.
A skunk has taken residence under our deck and war has been declared. Which is why we are trying to instill a fear of predators in Mr. Stinky. We will win! I do feel a little bad for Stinky though and I find myself wondering how they came to have black fur with those white stripes? If they didn’t stink up the place, skunks could be thought of as pretty, maybe even cuddly. Oh.. then there’s the possible rabies. Forget the cuddly.
Last week, after two skunk sightings in our yard, we called a pest control company and had the border of the property and the border of the house sprayed. Wouldn’t you know it, the next night, when we were eating dinner in the garden, right around 8 pm, like clockwork, there goes Stinky, up the stone steps, just as he’d done a few days earlier. I yell and clap my hands. Stinky stops, looks at me, fluffs out his tail, then runs home, past the jasmine vines, through the lattice, and under the deck. It’s like déjà vu. What surprises me is that there is no smell so I assume that even though the fluffed his tail, he didn’t spray. So tomorrow, we’ll call pest control to come out again. They said it might take a few treatments, then there’s the maintenance sprays we’ve scheduled. There are plenty of out of the way residences for Stinky nearby and I hope he relocates soon.