The three year old Shiba had her first encounter with a skunk last nite.
And "Mr Black and White Kitty" didn't want to play.
After running around and rubbing her face on three lawns I finally cornered her and threw her in the car. Wasn't gonna let her in the house smelling like that. Made a few calls and my sister recommended Dawn dish detergent, peroxide and oatmeal shampoo.
I had the last one but needed to buy the first two.
So off to the store we go and, boy, I had to explain to everyone within twenty feet of me what that SMELL was.
And I only got it from having the poor Shiba in the car.
So, needless to say, one bath with dawn. Then poured the peroxide on and washed that off. Then the oatmeal shampoo.
Worked perfect.
Now, the funny thing is I have smelled skunks before. But this didn't smell like that. The best way to describe it is it smelled like an electrical fire. People in the store kept saying something was burning.
I always tell people there are two different kinds of skunk odor:
1. The one you smell as you drive down the road and remark, "Hmm. Someone hit a skunk."
2. The really "up close and personal" smell known only to the animals and humans that have been unfortunate enough to fail avoiding contact with a skunk.
Good luck. You did right with the Dawn Detergent. It works so well I'm amazed they don't pitch it on a TV ad.
> After running around and rubbing her face on three lawns I finally cornered her and threw her in the car.
>
> So off to the store we go and, boy, I had to explain to everyone within twenty feet of me what that SMELL was.
>
>
Ho boy. We are getting so far off track as a nation, that we now have to explain what a skunk smells like. Yes, there IS a difference between the "Up close and personal" smell of a skunk, and the vague light duty smell, of one off in the distance.
Ok, this is supposed to be a rant. That we no longer live in the country... and have our dogs get sprayed at least occasionally, so we are out of touch with nature.... Like a kid who says "Wow, look at the grass and trees!" (Kid grew up in a concrete jungle, and still thinks "Milk comes from a jug"...
Now we are explaining skunk smell to city slickers!
That's a gas!
We all need to get out more... to the country!
🙂
> Scott-
>
> A link http://www.aaanimalcontrol.com/skunksmellremovalrid.htm
>
> Cheers,
>
> Derek
That's what I used about a month ago when one of our labs, got a Glancing blow from a skunk. Peroxide, Baking Soda and dish soap. Worked pretty darn good.
I had a brittany/setter mix a while back who got whacked by Mr Skunk. A couple big cans of tomato juice did the trick. Then a normal dog bath with dish soap in the tub. Only time you'd ever even get a whiff the next 6 months is if he got caught in the rain, then it was kind of musky until he dried out.
Dummy played with Mr Porcupine once too. Not good for his sniffer, as I used pliers to retract the needles.
He never played with either again, but sure could chase squirrils up a tree.
Smelling of Skunks
Your post brings to mind a recent encounter I had.
I was coming out of the mountains on a 2 track road at a pretty good clip and rounded a corner and hit a skunk with my left front tire. Instantly smelled the poor little guy probably because I frightened it right before I flattened it.
I continued on my way to town in a rush as I was running late for date night with SWMBO. I was pulled over for speeding by a county deputy. He approached my truck, took a couple of sniffs and asked if I had any marijuana in the truck. Of course I said no and to make the story short, consented to a vehicle search. I kept telling him I had hit a skunk and after about 30 minutes of the searching and another officer showing up, I was able to show them the spray and splatter matter on the under carriage of the truck. They both said the smell was very similar to that of high quality "skunk weed". They apologized for the time and I thanked them for their diligence. I only got a warning for speeding 60 in a 45.
This happened in Colorado, BTW.
SD
Here is a short story I wrote a few years ago.
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I was gold mining awhile back with my younger brother and we decided to investigate a drift tunnel near our property. The entrance was partially covered from erosion, so I spent 10 minutes digging it out, creating a hole just big enough to belly crawl through. We shined our lights inside and saw that the entrance dropped sharply. We considered the fact that it may be difficult to get back out, given the steep slope.
My younger brother (probably wisely) refused to go into the tunnel. Making the decision to go into a 120 year old tunnel through a very small entrance is kind of like jumping off a high cliff into freezing water. You kind of have to talk yourself into doing it, since you know it is dangerous. In the past I have spent significant amounts of time going through the hazards in my head - Could be bad air. Might be a den of rattlesnakes in there. Could be a mountain lion or badger living inside. Might be a skunk, or bats hanging on the ceiling. Could collapse and bury me alive.
I knew the kind of gold the old timers were getting - large nuggets. I decided to go in. The thought process was...if it hasn't collapsed in 120 years, it will probably be Ok for another 30 minutes. After crawling in head-first, the entrance dropped sharply about 15' in elevation. I slid/crawled down the slope on my belly and landed in a tunnel just big enough to barely squat in without hitting my head.
The material the miners were drifting into was a cemented conglomerate consisting of sand, boulders, and clay. Because they were getting gold off the bedrock, the tunnel had short offshoots in many directions following the crevasses where the gold was concentrated.
I ran my metal detector all over the floor and sides of the tunnel looking for that special sound that indicated gold. Occasionally the detector would sing off loudly on an old square nail in the wall where the old timers had hung their lanterns.
Meanwhile my brother is at the entrance impatiently waiting with his two dogs... "Did you find something?" - all he can hear is the muffled sound of my metal detector going off everywhere.
I made my way to the end of the main tunnel about 30' in and found a nice nugget, then another small one. I yelled to my brother that I was finding gold on the bedrock. He instantly dives into the tunnel entrance thinking we had hit the bonanza. His two dogs follow him in.
We take turns looking around and find a few small pieces of gold then decide to follow one of the offshoot tunnels. These were smaller in diameter so we had to army crawl in about 15' before the tunnel opened back up into a larger cavern.
I was laying on my belly about 10' into a different side tunnel when I hear the dogs sniffing around at the very end of my tunnel. I smell the faint smell of skunk. The thought crosses my mind that the dogs may be sniffing up a skunk. Critical seconds go by. Suddenly the dogs bolt out of the tunnel, running over the top of my back. I instantly yell SKUNK!GET OUT AS FAST AS YOU CAN! The smell was instantly over powering. I could see the mist floating in the air in front of my head lamp and could taste the pungent skunk spray. GO! GO! GO!
First the two dogs pop out of the tunnel entrance, then 20 or 30 seconds later my brother emerges. Next it's my turn, I am struggling to climb up the last steep slope. Through the patch of sunlight I see my brother's hand reaching towards me. I grab ahold and he drags me up through the opening. We both stood at the entrance breathing heavily, each of us had cuts and scrapes on our hands and elbows that were beginning to bleed.
We laughed at what had happened as we watch the dogs rubbing their faces on the ground.
Army crawling as fast as we did made me think of the soldiers in WW1 crawling for their lives.
I waited a year for the skunk smell to go away inside the tunnel and went back in thinking I would find some gold. Didn't find a single piece.
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> After running around and rubbing her face on three lawns I finally cornered her and threw her in the car.
WTH?!
You didn't really throw that skunked dog in the car did you? I got skunk in my house about 35 years ago. It took six months for the smell to totally go away. The moral to the story is, no matter how bad you want to get the skunk, don't shoot it on your back porch!
Nate,
I grew up in bush Alaska and we didn't have much in the way of fresh fruit. For years I thought peaches and pears grew in cans!!
-JD-
> I had the last one but needed to buy the first two.
The picture that just flashed in my head...dirty dishes, infected cuts, but a silky smooth beard made me lol 😀
> The best way to describe it is it smelled like an electrical fire. People in the store kept saying something was burning.
This hit home for me. A couple years ago, we started noticing a burning smell every time the heater kicked on. So we called the repairman out and he laughed as soon as he walked in. He said it was skunks, but we couldn't understand why it smelled like burning electrical wires. But apparently that's how some smell.
As it turned out, there was a family of skunks living in the crawl space under the house.
your in rare form today 😉
> WTH?!
(Hint) Your brother can stand skunk better!
I was referring to how Scott threw his dog into the car after being sprayed...WTH?!
Yeah, that bothered me too. What kind of dummy does that?
:excruciating: :excruciating: :excruciating: :excruciating: :-X :-O :-O 😀 😀
This is kind of long but it really happened this way.
My mom and dad live just down the road from us. They started smelling a strange odor in the back of the utility room. That part of the room used to be the back porch, which was concrete. When they expanded the room they set floor joists on the concrete and got the floor up level with the rest of the room. Well this odor kept getting stronger and my dad figured out it was coming from under the floor. He knew he couldn't get to that part from the crawl space, so he pulled up a couple of the 12" linoleum tiles and cut a hole in the subfloor. Found about 2 five gallon buckets full of some kind of poop in there on top of the concrete porch.
They had had a new central heat and air unit put in the previous year with ductwork under the house. The crawl space was low already, they had to dig a trench under the trunk line to get from one side to the other. Where they went thru the foundation they left an opening under the ductwork that we didn't know was there. So, I got the job of crawling under there to try to see what else had taken up residence and was using the old porch for an outhouse. I crawled from one end to the other, under the trunk line, looked in every place I could see and didn't find anything. So we plugged up the hole, set 4 steel traps near the crawl space door baited with canned tuna, and set an old window screen across the opening so we could see if we caught anything. Thought it might be a possum or a coon. Next day my mom called in a panic to get down there. Just inside the opening stood a skunk with 3 feet caught in the traps. Fortunately it had not sprayed, and it was facing the opening. A 22 to the head solved the problem, or so we thought. Reset the traps just in case, and the next day I got another panic phone call. This time there were 9 baby skunks in various stages of being caught or just stumbling around near the opening. Managed to get them all disposed of with very little odor by pulling the screen away and letting them wander into the yard.
Scary part is, they were all somewhere under there when I was crawling around. But there never was a skunk smell, just the poop. Guess it was my lucky day.
There is a third shunk oder that is past "up close and personal".
Let me explain, in the mid 1970's to the mid 1980's I was part of a crew that deer hunted with a friend who had a cabin in the Catskill Mountains in New York. At the time the cabin owner could take off October and November. He would trap, hunt ginseng and get to know the deer by the first names for the first six weeks and deer season was the last two weeks. One year the cabin owner thought it would be a good idea to cover our human scent with shunk scent. So every shunk he trapped that year he cut the scent gland out (think a grape but with a slit not a hole) and put them in a capped Mason Jar. Usually there were six to eight guys in the cabin for opening day of deer season but that year for wharever reason there were four of us. The cabin owner setup away from the cabin a piece of plate glass at a downward angle, with a shelf to hold pill bottles with cotton in them and tops next to the glass plate with a knife. The operation was to take a gland out of the Mason Jar place the gland on the glass plate with the slit facing down grade, cut the the gland above the silt and let the liquid flow into the pill bottle and cap it. Filling the bottles was done on seniority and I was the fourth seinor. The cabin owner filled his bottle OK. Second senior guy filled his bottle OK. Third senior guy (not the sharpest blade in the cabin) was scared, as he cut the gland, he twisted the gland toward himself and squeezed the gland getting all the liquid on himself and his clothing. Then he ran into the cabin. You did not smell it, you tasted it and there was a heaviness in the atmosphere in the cabin for the rest of deer season. Out to 200 yards from the cabin in all directions it was the "up close and personal" smell.
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Wow. That is hilarious!
That is simply amazing!
N
