When I first trapped it, I had to approach with a blanket then draped it over the trap.
There is no way I would have approached the trap with a .22 to shoot it. The critter would have nailed me before I even got gun to the cage to shoot it......
The best advice I've gotten so far is to let it be since it probably already has babies.......
Maybe. The one I shot was in our garage one night back in 1982 and I heard something out there. We lived in a country area and I grabbed my .22 and opened the door and my cat zipped past me, bolting at the skunk. That cat, all 20lbs of him, was on a mission. I grabbed the cat as it was about to leap and tossed him to the wife in the doorway and the skunk was about to fire so, POW, one shot and it dropped dead. . . And the stink was released. Took a lot of cleaning and scrubbing. Gawd awful.