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Hyde Park woman saves skunk with its head stuck in a peanut-butter jar
By adamg on Wed, 04/26/2023 - 9:18am
L'il Stinker turned jarhead in Hyde Park.
In the Hyde Park, MA Neighbors group on Facebook, Jess Madden-Fuoco recounts the excitement on Child Street in Hyde Park yesterday morning when her neighbor, Stephanie-Marie Cariello, turned into the hero one skunk needed:
My 9 year old daughter said, “Mom, there is a skunk with something stuck on its head!” A skunk was in front of our neighbor’s house with a jar stuck on its head. It kept walking in circles on the side walk, veering into the road once but then back onto the side walk. I called 311, and the woman said she would call animal control right away. As I got ready to leave for work, I kept peaking out to see if animal control had come. It still hadn’t come when I was ready to go, so as I headed out the front door, I saw my neighbor Stephanie walking her child to school. She told her child to wait on the corner near our house, and she ran across the street at the skunk. The skunk went through the white picket fence to avoid her, and she reached over the fence and grabbed the jar off its head! She said she didn’t get sprayed, but it must have sprayed after she ran away because it stunk! I told her that she is a hero!
Cariello did not examine the jar closely, but says it looked like a peanut-butter jar, definitely plastic.
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Comments
Similar situation
Way back in 1999, a new house was being built on my street in Rozzie.
The home building crew carelessly discarded a McDonalds milkshake cup onto the ground of the worksite. That sticky-sweet concoction inside that cup proved too much of a temptation for the skunk who found it.
On my way to work at 7 AM, I saw this skunk running around in circles, backwards, with no relief in sight. I felt so bad for the poor little critter. He couldn't even see around him due to the opaque nature of the cardboard cup, so he didn't even know I was there. I reached down toward his head, all the while he's running around backwards like a whirling dervish and, with one quick tug, I snagged the cup off his head.
The plastic ring from the lid remained around his neck, but he surely clawed that off of himself later.
He scurried off into the neighbor's yard without having sprayed, thankfully. It was a risk I knew I was taking, but that poor thing was helpless.
I was new on my street at the time and one of my neighbors was watching the spectacle from her window. It gave me good brownie points with the neighbors.
Mis-read it at first
I have to admit when I glanced at the headline I thought it said that she "shaves" it and thought WTF...but happily I just misread it . ;-)
Shaved Skunk
[adds this to the infinite list of fake band names]
Ah ha!
Is that your Poison cover band?
This
is the helping-remove-jars-from-skunks'-heads content that I crave.
I have to admit ...
Covering the largest city in New England, I never expected I'd get to post a story about an animal with its head stuck in a peanut-butter jar.
Then again, I never expected I'd find possums in my trash - or have the trash repeatedly knocked over and dragged down our deck stairs by raccoons, either.
I grew up in a rural area in
I grew up in a rural area in the middle of the woods and we had just about the same number of wildlife visitors as I do here in Boston (except we had no coyotes--those still startle me).
Not to mention
the turkeys and coyotes.
"Skunk with its head stuck in a jar" turns out to be moderately common among funny animal stories. This has a video of a cop in Cambridge getting a container off a skunk's head, and unfortunately getting sprayed in the process: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/cambridge-police-officer-skunk-yogur...
We accidentally caught a skunk in a live trap (back in Virginia) and had to figure out what to do. This was potentially more fraught than the jar scenario, because with the jar at least the business end of the skunk is pointing away from you. But the skunk was actually pretty chill about the whole situation, and no one got sprayed.
This is reassuring
When I try to think of metaphors for the condition of the world today, "skunk with its head caught in a peanut butter jar" frequently comes to mind. It's good to know that salvation from such a situation is possible.
Honestly
Who among us?
"They threw an old blanket
"They threw an old blanket over the skunk, watched the lump in the blanket to see where the head was. Then they grabbed the yogurt cup and the blanket and popped the cup off the skunk. The skunk, now able to see, crawled out from under the blanket and went away without spraying."
This blogger has some good suggestions as to what to do. I actually did help Somerville Animal Control free a skunk with its head stuck in a Yoplait cup some years ago, and he loosely wrapped the skunk in an old sheet with just the head showing, held it while I pulled off the cup. He put sheet and skunk on the ground, and we quickly retreated out of spray distance, but Mx Stinky scampered away from us right quick.
https://www.wxpr.org/natural-resources/2019-09-02/heres-what-to-do-if-yo...
FYI
Skunks dislike water. I managed to herd one out of a live trap and discourage it from lifting its tail by judicious squirts of my garden hose.