SKUNKS

The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way:
but the folly of fools is deceit.
Proverbs 14:8

I recently wrote on the bombardier beetle and the suggestion of a brother to send bombardier beetles to internet antagonists got me thinking about an animal with a similar talent as the beetle, but in the form of heavy artillery, namely, the skunk. Skunks have always fascinated me. I have had a number of encounters with the creatures, but they always behaved with good etiquette. I recall sleeping in the woods in the Olympic forest of Washington and waking up to find two skunks in my camp. One was messing with my hair while the other was a few feet away scouting about looking for something to pilfer. I didn’t want to disturb them, but I didn’t want them stealing what scarce little food that I had either, so I carefully got up without making any sudden movements and talked to them in a calm voice. They sauntered off without shooting me with their offensive spray, and I moved my camp down to the sandy beach where I was left alone for the rest of the night. Professional critter removal service men claim that you can carry off a skunk in a live trap without fear if you talk to them in a calm and friendly voice, and based upon my own experience, I believe them. My dog has never had a bad encounter with them, but she seems to respect them instinctively. One night after attending a meeting at a restaurant in the city, I noticed my dog chase a “cat” around to the side of the restaurant. The black and white coloring of the “cat” made me suspicious, so I went around the corner, and there she was with a skunk cornered. She seemed to know something was not right with this “cat” so she had stopped twenty feet from it and advanced no further. She is a very smart dog and I was very grateful for this, because we had over an hour-long drive ahead of us. In any event, that skunk was not going to go on the offensive against my retriever unless forced into it.

Skunks may be unpleasant animals in most people’s reckoning, and the word “skunk” is used as a pejorative, but they are really quite peaceful and docile. They rarely run too fast, because they do not feel a great need, and they must be seriously provoked before they will attack. If more people behaved like skunks, the world would be a better place. Have you ever stopped to think how amazing these animals really are? They are thought of as a type of weasel by some zoologists, but others no longer consider them to be weasels. I do not believe that they are weasels, but they were designed with many similarities. Anyone who has come into contact with a cabin that a wolverine has visited know that these creatures share some unfortunate characteristics with skunks. The same is true of smaller weasels, as ferret owners know well. The difference is that weasels use their foul scents to mark their territories; it would be useless against predators. The skunk also marks his territory with his scent, but he has the added ability to shoot his spray, which is much stronger than that of weasels, for distances up to 15 feet or more from two anal glands through powerful sphincters. The active ingredient of the spray is N bulymercaptan, which is a sulfur compound. If this creature evolved this ability, just how did that come about? Did this sulfur compound just happened to be lying around inside the skunk doing nothing until some smart black and white weasels decided to make use of it? Did these black and white weasels start exercising their anal muscles and spending a lot of time target practicing with their spray until they developed extraordinarily powerful muscles that gave them the ability to shoot their noxious fluid for such distances? Skunks are not incapable of defending themselves with their teeth and claws, but they are slow compared to weasels, and lack the ferocity of the stronger weasels like wolverines, badgers, fishers and martins. They are slow moving waddlers and climb very poorly. A skunk is not going to successfully fight off a dog without the use of his scent gland; a badger or a fisher can, and a wolverine would make short work of the toughest pit bull. How did these short-legged creatures survive while their ability to shoot their spray “evolved” over a long period of time? If they developed this ability all at once, how did it happen that all skunks developed it at the same time along with the genetic information necessary to pass it on to others? The odds of that genetic change happening in just one skunk are so high against it that it is completely silly to suggest it. What are the odds of it having happened with many skunks at the same time? Did it happen with just one skunk who passed on the genetic information? If so, we might ask ourselves what the odds are of that particular skunk having offspring successfully, and that all of the rest of the skunks of the world derived from just that one mutation while all of the rest managed to die out completely. The evolutionary cult member might say that they died out due to survival of the fittest and the fittest one got real lucky. Skunks do have enemies, such as owls, and they do get killed, in spite of their scents glands. If the offspring of one super skunk did get lucky, how did the nearly defenseless skunks survive so long in the first place? If they made it through thousands or millions of years of evolution without their spray defenses, they could certainly have survived a few thousand more and be still around today.

It should be obvious that the skunk was designed with his special defensive skill by an infinitely imaginative creator. Some people might ask why such a creator would create skunks. Personally, I think that God has a sense of humor, but it also is possible that he made such fascinating creatures to make evolutionists look stupid. In addition, he may have made skunks to give us something with which to compare evolutionists and politicians, although, I don’t think that is being very fair to the skunks.

Your servant in Christ,
John Hinton, Ph.D.
Bible Restoration Ministry
A ministry seeking the translating and reprinting of
KJV equivalent Bibles in all the languages of the world.