Alberta city offers free skunk removal
Cold Lake hires trapper to catch, relocate
Slavko Babincak was getting strange looks while tooling around town one day and couldn’t figure out why.
“Finally two guys asked, ‘Have you been sprayed by a skunk?’ And I’m like, ‘Maybe?’ ” Babincak recounted.
Perhaps the odour was so strong it killed his sense of smell.
Perhaps he just got used to it.
Either way, he headed home for a shower and a change of clothes, chalking up another day trapping skunks in Cold Lake, Alta.
The eastern Alberta city — population 16,300 — has hired Babincak to trap the striped critters and relocate them where they can’t cause a stink for residents.
Cold Lake began offering it as a free service last year, and funding was renewed in its most recent budget.
Babincak has been in the pest control business for more than a decade but began wrangling pests such as pigeons and mice as far back as his childhood in Serbia.
Along the way, he’s learned the ways of the black-andwhite stinkers — sometimes the hard way.
“If you get sprayed straight in the face, at least for me, it’s just like you can vomit right there,” he says.
And there’s not much that can be done when it does happen.
“People say tomato juice and this and that. Trust me, I tried all this stuff,” Babincak says. “The best thing to use? Nothing, really — just time.”
Aside from the potential unpleasantness of being sprayed, there’s not much to catching a skunk, he says. Cat food and sardines make good bait, but skunks aren’t too particular.
“They’re not picky. They’re not complicated. They’re pretty simple animals,” says Babincak. “They need a full belly and somewhere to sleep.”
Once skunks are trapped, Babincak drives about half an hour outside Cold Lake and lets them out on Crown land.
Cold Lake Mayor Craig Copeland says skunk trapping has been an evolving process and one of many unique problems for an urban area that exists on the edge of the forest wilderness.
Alberta Fish and Wildlife officers used to deal with skunk calls. When that stopped, the city started loaning out traps. But then residents would catch the critters — or catch something else — and wonder what to do with it.
So it was time to call professional help.
“It just was a better way to do it than people just signing out the skunk traps and then sometimes they’re catching the neighbour’s cat,” says Copeland.