For the love of animals

It is fair to say that in general I am an animal lover. I am not an extremist and I still consume animal products (aka meat) etc, but I do have a great love of animals. I do believe we need to learn to live with them and in general I really try to.

We have lived in our current house for 12 years. For these 12 years we have always had skunks and bunnies and raccoons around. This hasn't really been a problem (except maybe the time Loki hunted a baby bunny in the backyard).

On Sunday we discovered that nature has become a little too close for comfort. Several weeks ago, we had seen a mom and baby skunk in the driveway when we returned home from the NAC. They took off. Turns out this skunk family, along with another baby have taken up residence under our front steps. This would normally not be a huge problem but several things have happened to make this a problem.

1) Mom skunk has died. This means we have a lot of maggots and flies at our front door.
2) We are trying to sell our house and having the live and dead skunks as neighbours is not the sort of feature that will help.

Normally I would think I would remove the dead mom (obviously) but live with the babies (they are so cute) but not when I am trying to sell a house. So we have hired someone to put out live traps.

The irony of all of this is that we have not had a showing for one week and of course the realtor not  called wanting to do one at the same time as pest control was coming. We moved the showing to tomorrow. We didn't think seeing a dead skunk being removed would help us sell the house.

FYI: Hailey has shown no interest in the spot. Perhaps they smell too bad for her!

Update: When I checked the traps this morning there is one not so happy baby skunk in one. I feel bad cause it is raining. They guy will come and get it soon and release it in a safe place.  However, he/she got a can of free tuna, so I don't feel as bad!

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