Recently Stunky started piddling small puddles all over the house. We called the vet afraid that it might be a urinary tract infection or some sort of similar issue. The Vet gave us an appointment time and said "Please bring a urine sample with you."
Now, I don't know about your pets, but my skunk is not intelligent enough to understand "please go pee in this cup for the vet." If you are prepared in advance you may have some plastic pellets made for collecting cat samples which can be placed in a clean litter box and will not absorb the urine. However, I did not have any of this on hand so I had to get creative. My first thought was "well, she's peeing all over the floor, I will just suck it up in a syringe." but unfortunately, the very small amounts she was peeing were not enough to collect a sample, and I'm not sure my floor is the most sterile of collection points.
From there I looked at the possibility that my problem was simply that my skunk didn't need to pee bad enough. Most skunks don't drink tons of water, and giving water to them seems like an exercise in futility since they will likely ignore it. I solved this problem with watermelon. My skunk loves it and happily devoured as much as I could give her. After that, I placed the skunk in a small tupperware container (pictured to the right) and hoped that she would pee while sitting in there. Unfortunately, she thought I just gave her a magnificent new bed and refused to pee in it. She did, however, hunker down and fall asleep in it. I rode her to the vet's office sitting in the plastic container and we gave her all sorts of encouragement on the way... she slept through it.
Once we got to the vet's office they had me sitting in the waiting room waiting for the skunk to pee. As my appointment time ticked by and we were still waiting a vet tech finally came out and together we discussed the issue. She had me lift Stunky up out of the box and hold her above it with my fingers putting pressure around her bladder. Finally Stunky couldn't take it anymore and gave us a nice sample in the tupperware (which I informed the vet I did NOT need back.) The little devil peed on my lap three more times during the vet visit too...
Since this incident I have kept a small bag of hydrophobic litter and a clean box at my house, just in case of another incident. If you value your sanity and your tupperware you may wish to do the same.
Click for information about sample collection sand.