Wear surgical gloves when you deal with skunks! They are rabies carriers and I am told that they can live their entire lives with the disease and never develop the symptoms, like HIV in a human. They can spread it and still live a long life. I bleach all of my gear that I use for skinning them and dispose of the gloves and cardboard in my wood burner when I am done. I also keep my dog out of the shop when dealing with skunks.
I skin all of the skunks I catch as well as my friends and the road kill I find too. I use one of those hook razor utility roofing knives to open them as well as my beaver and coon. The glands are right beside and above the rear vent. You really have to screw up to get them to squirt. They are tough little bulges. On the first few you can leave the big triangle patch but after a few you won’t need to leave even that. Don’t try and pull the first few tails, skin around the base just like a coon get an inch or so of the tail bone exposed and the cut the tailbone from the body. Skin the rest of the skunk with no fear of it going off. You can then pull the tail by clamping a vice grip to the exposed section and using a tail puller in the normal fashion. Pulling the tails while attached to the skunk can cause leakage. If you decide to leave the patch of fur save the carcass and take your skinning knife on the line with you. Find a fence and wire him to a fence and skin out the area around the glands. This will teach you in a safe way where they are located and how tough they are. I harvest all of the essence (quill) from my skunks with a syringe. If you decide to do this just use a water bottle to store it in. Stretch a rubber glove over the opening of the water bottle. When you fill the syringe pierce the glove with the loaded syringe and discharge your gold into the bottle. It keeps the smell to a minimum. Store the water bottle in a bucket of dirt with a lid. Bury the bottle in the bucket of dirt and you get no smell.
