NaturallyResilient

About

Cats like having a human wait on them, this includes opening doors. To counter this behavior we installed cat doors. The standard size for a cat door is 4”x4” which is very small for our large 12 to 18 pound cats. We install the larger “small dog” doors for our cats and even then it was a squeeze for our largest cat.

One house we lived in had a small dog door installed in the wall leading between the utility room and the garage, and another one installed in the garage door. This way the cats could ‘wipe’ their feet on the way to the inner-sanctum for the house.

One day we had been doing some work in the garage with the garage door open. That evening we closed the garage door and went to bed. About 2:00 AM we awoke to a scratching sound in the living room. Paul got up to see what the cats were up to. The cat was scratching at the carpet where the door to the study was. In the dark, Paul leaned down to push the cat away from the door. His first clue was that he felt he had to reach down farther than he should for one of our cats. That is when he decided to turn on a light.

As Paul’s eyes became adjusted to the light, he saw that the creature was not our black and white cat but a black and white skunk. Paul swung the door to the study open to let the skunk check that out because it was insistent in clawing its way into the study. The window was open creating a draft under the door that the skunk was feeling.

After making its way around the room and realizing there was no way out, it meandered back out. In the mean time, Paul had opened the front door which was very close to the study door. As the skunk came out, it sensed the bigger draft from the front door and started that direction. However one of our cats, Brenda, had seen the open door and thought that was a novelty in the middle of the night and ran over and sat in the doorway.

The skunk saw the cat and raised his tail. Paul grabbed a jacket from the coat rack and holding it behind the skunk said soothingly “Its OK, you don’t have to spray”, then, out of the corner of his mouth he hissed to the cat in the doorway, “Brenda, get out of the way”. Finally, Brenda took the hint and moved out of the doorway. The skunk then meandered out of the door.

Luckily it never sprayed and it was then that we determined that juvenile skunks that have never sprayed don’t smell (or that would have been a bigger clue that it was a skunk in the living room). The only damage was to the carpet by the study door. We think the skunk may have been closed in the garage that night and the first cat door he came to was into the house.