{"id":729418,"date":"2026-08-06T14:18:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729418\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T14:18:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:18:16","slug":"are-you-allowed-to-own-a-pet-skunk-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729418\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you allowed to own a pet skunk in the UK?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Evie Batton, senior scientific officer at the RSPCA, said it is not illegal to keep a skunk as a pet in the UK.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I think that might surprise people,&#8221; she added, but said choosing one as a pet was &#8220;not something the RSPCA would ever advise&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;These are wild animals, they&#8217;re not domesticated.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Chris Moiser, director of Tropiquaria, added: &#8220;They&#8217;re very popular animals. Most of the skunks as pets in the UK came from the fur trade until they became more desirable as pets.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Moiser said of the skunk rescue: &#8220;I drove very carefully with it in the car and everything was fine. Later it sprayed the microchip reader &#8211; but fortunately missed our staff.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evie Batton, senior scientific officer at the RSPCA, said it is not illegal to keep a skunk as&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":729419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-729418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}