A Skunk, By Any Other Name...

Albuquerque biologist Jerry Dragoo was first drawn to study the Mustelid family— which includes otters, badgers, weasels, ferrets, and wolverines— because they were small creatures, like he was, and ferocious in self-defense. But fate had a more appropriate calling for the amiable biologist.

Tasked by his graduate advisor with investigating the lowly skunk, Dragoo was ultimately led to propose, in a groundbreaking 1997 paper, that they were not Mustelids at all, and should be reclassified in their own family, the Mephitidae, from mephitis, “noxious odor.”

These amiable omnivores native to the Americas turned out to be a perfect match for Dragoo, mirroring his own mix of attraction and repulsion to his kind. Though he took no serious offense at being assigned to the bushy creatures, Dragoo was transformed into “the Skunk Man” in part because his early fieldwork revealed that he was born without a sense of smell.

It wasn’t until he first returned to the lab at Texas A&M University after wrangling with a spraying skunk that Dragoo discovered what it was to be always unwelcome. Sweetly indifferent to the skunk’s last line of defense, Dragoo has, over the decades, been kicked out of meetings, evicted from apartments, ordered out of buildings, and generally tainted with the unsought celebrity of the little mammal that just wants to be left alone.

Small wonder if he now lives with his wife Gwen on a remote tract reached only by unsigned dirt roads, deep in the heart of Torrance County. “We don’t like people,” he quips when a visitor drives up.

What they do love, clearly, is skunks.

Dragoo recently left the University of New Mexico, where he was the Biology Animal Resource Facility operations manager (or “BARF o man,” he says), for the state agriculture department’s veterinary diagnostic lab, where he is director of technical operations. After years of renown as founder of the Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations (dragoo.org), and dozens of magazine and television profiles, Dragoo has had to scale back his skunk stardom to focus on a job that does not allow animals in the building, scented or unscented.

That has made it challenging for the couple to continue their role as the region’s premier skunk rescuers, a role thrust upon them as soon as people learned that Dragoo “did” skunks, bringing him orphans they’d found. “We kept them as pets initially because we didn’t know what else to do,” he explains—a situation that led to six permanent residents roaming the house and sleeping in their bed until the last of them died, one at the record age of 16½.

When they moved to New Mexico and became mammal rescuers for Wildlife Rescue in Albuquerque, the Dragoos learned how to release animals into the wild. Even now, when a skunk is found injured or orphaned, the couple comes to the rescue.

This is no small commitment, given that the orphans are usually just a few days old, and need to be individually bottle-fed every four hours, around the clock. Once their teeth come in, at 6 weeks, the schedule eases back to every six hours, a burden that used to be split between Jerry’s office at UNM and Gwen’s position as head veterinary technician at the Albuquerque Zoo. One year they had 86 animals come through (not all of them infants), though a normal year sees closer to 30.

At 8 weeks, skunks move to solid food, which in the wild means mainly bugs, but can include everything from snakes to frogs to bees. Dragoo tries to mimic this diversity by raiding his garden for pests, and supplementing that with vegetables, fruit, some grain and eggs, and a good-quality puppy chow.

Why bother to rescue skunks? The animal is not endangered, and in New Mexico is classified as vermin, meaning homeowners can kill them at will.

Basically, Dragoo has grown to love the little critters—who are loaded with personality, he says—and has never modeled a scientist’s emotional distance from his objects of study.

His rehabilitating residents live in the yard, first in a covered pen to protect them from predators, then in a fenced area designed to help them stay wild as they fatten up to survive the transition.

Adapting to a foreign environment is hard on skunks, Dragoo acknowledges, as for all wildlife. But they are not territorial creatures, and are generally quite adaptable. “Normally the mom kicks them out when summer turns to fall,” he says. That means the six who were living in his pen this summer—three of them caught by a dog, three others found dehydrated and weak—would soon be taken to national forestland, far from humans, and probably wander off without a backward glance.

“I think it’s one of those animals people either love or hate,” Dragoo says of his lifelong preoccupation with the Mephitidae. Skunks have been popular as exotic pets, especially in the South, and were bred by farmers to catch rats and mice. Illegal now in most states because they can carry rabies, pet skunks are still allowed in about a dozen states (including New Mexico) with a permit.

“People often ask me if skunks make good pets. I tell them no, what makes a good pet is a good pet owner,” Dragoo says. His website discourages domestication, as skunk pet-hood is plagued by the usual human fickleness, with the added danger that pet skunks, because they have had their scent glands removed, can never be released in the wild. “It’s a death sentence,” says Dragoo. “That’s how skunk rescue got started.”

Skunks bite and scratch in self-defense, and spray only if they fear for their lives. Their first impulse is to flee. But so noxiously disabling is the 4-ounce shot of sulfur-containing compounds that the animal has few natural enemies. Most predators (with the exception of certain dogs) need only one encounter to recognize forever after the distinctively marked creature that is worth avoiding.

It’s easy to see why. Skunks are active at night, when animals rely heavily on their sense of smell to hunt. One shot from the butt of a skunk (they aim for the eyes) can be completely disabling, causing the eyes and nose to run copiously, and sometimes makes it hard to breathe.

The slow-motion mechanics of this impressive weaponry are laid bare in a video that marks another of Dragoo’s landmark contributions to skunk science. To get the money shot, he positioned a cameraman in his bedroom at a squeakyclean window, then taunted a wild skunk outside. The resulting extreme close-up of a skunk anus firing its jets (“Is That a Skunk?” at PBS Nature) “can never be unseen,” as one writer put it.

Humans also have outsized reactions to the putrid poison, which is a serious summertime scourge in some communities. The ubiquitous Striped Skunk is seen from coast to coast, from Toronto to Tijuana, including every state in the Lower 48. Ten more species include the hog-nosed, hooded, and spotted types.

Here in New Mexico, the smell of summer in the bosque and mountains could be a Striped, Hooded, Western Spotted, or Whitebacked Hognose Skunk. The bushy-tailed critter shares with the coyote, raccoon, and bear a vexing talent for reclaiming every habitat fenced off by Homo sapiens. Some Midwestern towns are so overrun that an odiferous cloud hangs over the entire community all summer.

Dragoo blames humans for creating the conflict. “Skunks aren’t a problem; they’re a symptom of the problem,” he says. “If you cover it, they can’t get to it.” Most skunk invasions are propped up by unintentional feeding by humans, which in the case of skunk-infested Marysville, Calif., turned out to be food left out for feral cats.

Simultaneously adored and reviled, equal parts harmless and deadly, skunks have in Jerry Dragoo a lovable fellow pariah and lifelong champion—an odor that is not easy to wash away.