{"id":1279,"date":"2019-10-11T10:11:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T15:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2019\/10\/11\/20191011-skunkvscougar\/"},"modified":"2022-02-19T17:39:19","modified_gmt":"2022-02-19T23:39:19","slug":"20191011-skunkvscougar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2019\/10\/11\/20191011-skunkvscougar\/","title":{"rendered":"Spunky Skunk vs Cowed Cougar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a title=\"Please accept my apologies for the term 'skunknap.' I have no excuses.\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2019\/10\/10\/191010-skunk\/\">yesterday&#8217;s post,<\/a> I described my uneasy efforts to release a skunk from a trap. During that process, I kept reminding myself to not get complacent; just because I&#8217;d never been sprayed, I shouldn&#8217;t think it couldn&#8217;t happen. It didn&#8217;t, and even though I eventually had to agitate the animal a bit to get it to leave, it never made any threatening motions.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, in my experience &#8212; admittedly limited and YMMV &#8212; skunks are pretty chill. And when you think about it, there&#8217;s good reason: their defense mechanism is probably one of the most effective on the planet, and humans aren&#8217;t the only ones to recognize that fact. Case in point is the following video originating from Canada, in which a cougar (the mountain lion kind, not the older-woman-predator kind) discovers that his threat pales alongside a skunk&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"ui-droppable\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oglTwZ63yr8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>One suspects that the cougar has learned about the skunk&#8217;s odoriferous emanations the hard way, although that begs the question of whether cougars are really so stupid as to think that another encounter would yield a different outcome. Or, maybe, it was just that hungry.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the apparent lesson for us less-stinky humans is that when we need a boost in self-confidence, we simply need to picture ourselves as skunks. <i>[insert political figure joke here]<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In yesterday&#8217;s post, I described my uneasy efforts to release a skunk from a trap. During that process, I kept reminding myself to not get complacent; just because I&#8217;d never been sprayed, I shouldn&#8217;t think it couldn&#8217;t happen. It didn&#8217;t, and even though I eventually had to agitate the animal a bit to get it&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2019\/10\/11\/20191011-skunkvscougar\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Spunky Skunk vs Cowed Cougar<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-wildlife-mammals","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7585,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1279\/revisions\/7585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}