When your new baby comes home one of the first things you will try to do is figure out what litterbox works best. It makes sense. Skunks poop, and nobody wants to have a house covered in poop. Unlike with kittens, however, skunks will not instantly find a litterbox and bury their poop within it. In fact, with their bug hunting instincts, I've found them far more likely to play, dig, and sleep in their litter than to poop in it.
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With baby season only a few months away and people deciding whether or not they want to put a deposit down on a baby skunk, I want to talk about one of what I consider the "best kept secrets" of skunk ownership. Their ability to be litter trained. I talk to people when I am out with my skunk and when they ask about my skunk's restroom habits I always gloss over them with "they're litter trained" or "they use puppy pads" and move on. There is SO much more to skunk potty training than that, and it can become a disaster if you aren't prepared for it.
A bit of background to explain this: I am an anosmic. I have no sense of smell at all. I was born that way and doctors have told me that there's no way to bring it back. I'm smell blind. This fact of my everyday life makes it twice as hard to keep my house clean, since I have chosen to keep animals who hoard poop. I don't believe skunks hoard poop on purpose. I think as babies they don't know any better, and as adults they are either angry or lazy. But it happens, and far more than a lot of us like to admit. I don't know many skunk owners who don't have at least one story of finding a poop hoard somewhere their skunk had designated as a den. This is mine:
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