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Skunks running amok in East Boston
By adamg on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 9:12am
Fabulously Out There reports she was sprayed by one of the gazillion skunks that have made Jeffries Point their home - as she was walking home, minding her own business one night on Webster Street:
Oh. My. Fucking. God. The smell was just awful. I raced home and managed to get rid of the smell by using a layer of multiple body scrubs and shower gels. No one will ever call me a product whore again and laugh. Then, naturally, I figured out that Fabulous Dog also had a patch of skunk on his back and Lani also had one, on her head…so then we had to do the same body scrub/shower gel treatment on both dogs.
And now she's on a mission to, among other things, get the city to do something and get people to stop putting out food for stray cats:
YOU ARE FEEDING THE SKUNKS. I can't even tell you how often I have seen skunks eat the cat kibble while the cats stay in safe distance. Stop it.
Neighborhoods:
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Comments
Feeding rats too
I've wanted to make little signs that say "Please stop feeding the rats!" to put near the hunks of bread I see on sidewalks (or the two times I've seen piles of cereal). I envision a cartoon of a bird saying, "Gee, I'm full! I can't eat all this." with an adjacent rat saying, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."
Oh, I like this idea. It
Oh, I like this idea.
It seems that almost all of the Vietnamese folk around Savin Hill leave food out in the street or their driveways. It must be some cultural thing, because no one else does it. Between this and (usually the same people) leaving their trash out without barrels (just bags on the ground) on trash night, it's no wonder I see rats and skunks all the time at night.
There goes the Garden Party
Living in East Boston, I have encountered a skunk in front of my house one night. Luckily I got away without a spraying, but I'm pretty sure he flipped me the paw. They are a problem, not so much for the smell but the rabies risk. I've also encountered some pretty enormous possums in front of my house, which give me the heebie-jeebies far worse than a skunk. Oddly, I've never seen rats. I think they've been priced out of the n'hood.
The story Channel 5 story that Fabulously Out There links to is kinda funny. I couldn't help but imagine an Onion version of the same report with "gentrifiers" or "fixie-riding tatooed hipsters" replacing "skunks".
A few years ago...
...our corner of Roslindale had a number of rabid skunks. And apparently rabid skunks are rather incontinent (with regard to leaking their smelliness). So we had eau de skunk in the air pretty much all the time for ages and ages.
Skunks
Yep- I was over there visiting a friend the other night and ran into two skunks on the waterfront while we went out to have a smoke. This happens every time I go there. They are rampant. However- from what I am told unless you startle them they won't spray you as they know Humans generally leave them alone.
I got skunked too
years ago, around Mass. Ave. and Russell Street near Porter Square. Not a fun experience. I ended up throwing out a bunch of clothes, because even leaving them out in the rain for days didn't get rid of the scent.
Been Lucky
I've even startled one skunk in the driveway of a certain Fenway brownstone and dumped another out of a camping bin, but they didn't see fit to spray me. They just ambled off with an annoyed flounce.
We did have certain scent issues when our garage door was busted and they were "getting a room" in there. Yuck!
The mom moving her baby to a new den made up for any and all of it in epic Rule 7 cuteness. The entire family watched for at least a half hour as the mom and baby had a dialog about how the baby was too big to carry and too big to fit under mom and too scared to take the bigger of the stairs around the back of our property.
Forget the skunks, people are the real stinkers
I see the skunk on Sumner a lot. It's rambled by within a dozen feet of me and other people and not cared. I suspect the original poster's dogs are what set it off. I smell it every few days; by my wife assumes that it's just cars going by that startle it.
There's also a family of raccoons living around here. I snapped a few pictures of the pregnant mom climbing up three stories of the outer post of the neighbor's balcony to get onto the roof.
I don't mind the wild animals. I'm more annoyed by the people who don't clean up after their dogs (I'm talking to you, whoever is leaving gigantic mounds of shit on the sidewalks of Sumner Street) and the morons who honk their horns early in the morning. (Get out of your thumpa-thumpa car and ring the doorbell. People are trying to sleep.)