Should I feed a baby skunk I found?

Human beings love to care for wild and stray animals. The cat that wanders the neighborhood but has not real home can probably go to any one of four houses on your block and find a saucer of milk or some pieces of chicken out on the back porch for it get a snack. The baby birds that lost their mother find a parent in the kid who whips together a concoction that provides the nourishment it needs so that it grows strong is ready to fly off on its own.



There is something that seems instinctual in human beings that makes them want to care for wild animals and to help them so that they are able to survive and even thrive. Everyone seems to have a story of how they have helped the poor wild animal and this makes them feel so much better to know that they have done this.

But what about the baby skunk that is wandering near your home. This is a wild animal as well, but do you really want to spend your time caring for an animal like this? Your answer should be emphatically no.

Let’s start with the first thing to consider. What happens when you start to feed any kind of wild animal? They keep coming back for food. If an animal knows that it can find food someplace, even one or two times, it will keep coming back to their looking for food over and over. It is just natural.

So, ask yourself if you want a baby skunk returning to your home to get food each day? While it may be cute as a baby, someday it is going to grow up and then you have to ask yourself if you want an adult skunk around your property at all. If that skunk is startled at any point by you, your family member or your pet they are going to be sprayed and you sure don’t want to try to clean up from that. Even if you or your family don’t startle it, if another animal does so it will spray and you will have that smell on your property for days if not weeks. There is just no way that this is good.

It is common to want to help the wild animal, especially babies, but you have to control your instinct to be a nice person. These animals are dangerous for other reasons, including the fact that they carry diseases and parasites, and if you keep allowing that animal to return to your property you are endangering your animals by exposing them to these parasites. That is not an option you can afford to allow to happen. You just can’t! Read more: Skunk Control, how to kill skunks.