An Old Town police officer recently freed a skunk whose head somehow became stuck in two Dunkin’ cups.
The skunk’s misadventure likely began while it tried to indulge its sweet-tooth or get a late-night caffeine boost before heading back to the University of Maine.
But the skunk clearly got more than it bargained for.
Enter Officer David Hilton, who recently moved to Maine from Georgia this spring, according to the Old Town Police Department.
In an encounter caught on his body camera, Hilton approached the crepuscular creature at the Dunkin’ drive-through on Stillwater Avenue.
While deftly avoiding getting in the path of the south-end of an anxious skunk, Hilton removed both cups from the animal’s head. And once freed, the skunk, in what may be interpreted as an expression of gratitude, scampered away without spraying Hilton.
That’s not the first case where police officers needed to retrieve a skunk’s head from human garbage. In August 2019, Bridgton officers came across a skunk whose head was stuck in a McFlurry cup, but Officers Sophie Swiatek and Josh Muise managed to free the animal from its soft-serve prison. Just a couple weeks before that, Portland police officers saved a skunk that got its head stuck in an aluminum can. Earlier that year, police in Billerica, Massachusetts, helped a skunk that somehow got its head stuck in a Bud Light can.
In September 2017, York police officers freed a skunk’s head from a McDonald’s cup, while in June 2017 Rockland police saved a skunk with its head in a peanut butter jar. Two years earlier, a Lewiston police officer got sprayed by an ungrateful skunk after he freed its head from a glass jar.
A Millinocket woman was luckier in August 2016 when she freed an unfortunate skunk that got its head stuck in a peanut butter jar.
These skunks belong to a comic fraternity dubbed “trash-can heads.” But all those containers humans toss can become death traps for animals.
“It happens all the time, and most of the time we don’t even know about it, because the animals die,” Greg Grimm, a volunteer and board member for Gold Country Wildlife Rescue in Auburn, California, told the Washington Post in 2018. Grimm’s group in 2018 managed to save a young coyote whose head had been lodged in a plastic jug for at least 10 days, the newspaper reports. After four weeks of rehabilitation, that coyote was freed into the wild.
“We handle, like, 3,500 animals a year,” Grimm told the Post. “But there’s a few that are special, and the coyote was one of them.”