To the backyard chicken-keeper, skunks are pests, disease-carriers, feed-thieves and killers. As we all know, they also boast a
unique defense mechanism that has the ability to continue to offend its victims for days or weeks: the stink factor. My neighbor, "Miss Sarah," as my daughters call her, has a beautiful Akbash farm dog named Peanut, who recently had the misfortune of meeting the south-bound end of a north-bound skunk- face first. 

The mention of this skunk encounter on my Facebook page prompted the sharing of a 'recipe' for a de-skunking solution by Shelly W. Several others, seasoned dog groomers included, vouched for its effectiveness and contributed tips that I now invite you to keep handy in the event you should ever need it.

De-Skunking Shampoo   

1quart hydrogen peroxide
1 Tablespoon baking soda
1Tablespoon Dawn dish detergent
2 quarts warm water.

Mix all ingredients well. Work the solution into the pet's fur, hair, skin, feathers, whatever, thoroughly for at least five minutes. Rinse thoroughly with water. Repeat if necessary. Follow-up with De-Skunking Rinse.

De-Skunking Rinse  

Mix a solution of 9 parts water to 1 part white vinegar. Rinse the pet with this solution. Do NOT rinse.

NOTE:

Shampoo should be mixed prior to each use, never mixed and stored.

Shampoo is drying to the skin. May require follow-up with a leave-in conditioner. 

May bleach fur. 

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One winter during a heavy cold spell, one of our cows had a calf. By the time it was found, the little critter had become very chilled and required veterinary attention. Enter the machinery for this story: my parents 1972 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham that looked docile, but under the hood beat a 440 (non HEMI ) with a four barrel carb that would propel the boat 118+ miles per hour (experience talking here) and still knock out 22 miles per gallon on road trips without breaking a sweat. But I digress and direct my writing to the story at hand.

Rather than subject the critter to an additional frosty ride to town in the back of the pickup, it was put in the trunk (that was about half the size of the barn) and Mom and Dad set off for the Veterinary clinic."Doc" as we called him was one of those entertaining characters that was always thinking out loud and had a colorful vocabulary that though not personally offensive, requires some judicious editing.

Mom and Dad pulled up outside the clinic and Dad went in to get Doc. When they came out, Doc asked Dad "where's the calf? Dad took him around to the trunk as Mom pushed the electric trunk release to reveal the calf nestled in some old blankets, gaining much needed body temperature. Doc made the comment of all the years of being a vet, it took Dad to be the first one to bring livestock to him in the trunk of a luxury automobile. The calf was checked over, medication administered, and the critter was deemed OK to go back to the farm to take up space basking in the warmth of a heat lamp in the barn.

While Dad and Doc walked around the front of the car, Mom said she smelled something like burnt hair. After determining that the calf was not in any danger of becoming BBQ, Dad popped open the hood and revealed a skunk perched under the hood, left feet on the valve cover and its right feet on the inner fender well. The critters fluffy tail hairs had come to rest on the exhaust manifold, however it was cognitive enough not to allow the meaty portion to come in contact with the heat. Doc went into his office and returned with some type of large caliber hand cannon and told Dad to poke the skunk and when it jumped out, he would send it to oblivion. Dad, unsure of this hasty request was none too eager to start poking the critter under the hood of his car resulting in a massive under hood pungent air freshener. Doc replied "ah, don't do that, I don't want a dead skunk in my yard, take it downtown and park in the intersection of first and main, open the hood open and let the police deal with it!" Fortunately for local law enforcement, Dad just said he would just let the skunk travel back home by the same means as it came. 

All four of them made the journey home via the long way as Mom and Dad thought it better to avoid town in case something went terribly wrong that would result in a pungent mess to clean up. They went to the house where the calf was rejoined to its mother in the nice cozy barn; Dad picked up his .22 rifle and the pickup and sent Mom out by the oil well tank batteries where the goal was to dispatch the skunk. Upon trying to coax the critter out the skunk exercised sound judgment and was able to traverse the engine compartment and car frame to avoid Dad from getting a clear shot. After a few minutes of synchronized critter flushing out, Mom and Dad determined that it was too cold to be worried about the skunk. The New Yorker was left out at the tank battery for a period of time that allowed the cold to sink in encouraging the critter to seek a warmer residence. The car was later retrieved with no physical or smelly damage.

Perhaps this skunk benefited from the farmland critter safety course inspired by the earlier baling incident. Human contact 101: how to keep safe while humans are in pursuit.

Several weeks ago on a Wednesday night, after getting home from work and finishing up the chores, I went inside to start supper. Maggie and Boone, our dogs, decided they wanted to go out, so I let them out. A few minutes later, I heard them barking, which is normal, but this was a different bark.

Seconds later – and I mean seconds – I smelled what I thought was a gas leak. Deciding the dogs would be OK for a few minutes, I started looking for a leak. The smell was so strong, it was hard to breathe. Needing fresh air, I went to the door and walked outside. Turns out the “gas leak” was actually a skunk – in the yard, chasing the dogs. Before I knew what was happening, the skunk turned and sprayed again, this time hitting Maggie. Luckily, Boone didn’t get sprayed.
 

Our loyal and mischievous Labrador Retrievers, Maggie and Boone. 

I have never seen a skunk chase a dog, let alone two 100-pound black Labs, so I was pretty sure it was rabid. I hollered for the dogs and got them in the house. Bad idea, I know, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to take a chance of them getting bit by a rabid skunk. So, now, in addition to having a tough time breathing, my eyes were watering, I felt sick, and I had both dogs right beside me, letting me know they were protecting me. You’ve got to love their loyalty!

Leaving the dogs inside, I went back outside. No skunk in sight. The only sign of it was the lingering smell. Well, you can’t shoot a skunk if you can’t see it, but you can trap it – if you’re lucky. We weren’t lucky. We set a trap, but never saw the skunk again, although his “perfume” stuck around for about a week and a half.

I didn’t think the skunk had got close enough to the dogs to bite them, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I called the vet the next morning and told him what happened. He checked their records, and they were up to date on their rabies vaccinations, but he had us bring them in for a booster anyway. He chuckled when I told him Maggie had been sprayed, and then he gave me a recipe that I will always treasure.

For those of you who’ve been lucky enough to never have seen the spray of a skunk up close, it’s oily – thick, greasy and oily. Anyway, the vet said to mix 1 to 2 teaspoons of Dawn dish soap (to cut the grease) with an entire bottle of peroxide and 1/4 cup of baking soda (both of these ingredients kill the smell) in a bowl. Mix it up thoroughly and rub it on the dog. Be very careful not to get it in the dog’s eyes, ears, nose or mouth. Lather it up real good, then rinse it out. He said to be sure and rinse Maggie extremely well or she would turn gray from the peroxide. She’s almost 9, so she’s already gray in areas, but we rinsed her way better than she wanted to be rinsed, in order to make sure most of her stayed black.

Bathing Maggie is no easy job. She’s 100 pounds, so her baths are given outside in the baby pool. She hasn’t been in the shower since she was little enough that I could manhandle her. However, since it was raining and kind of cold outside, we opted for the shower. Maggie loves water, but she did not like taking a shower one bit. We bathed her every night for a week, and by about the fourth night, she just looked at me as if she was saying, “OK, Mom, just hurry up and get it over with.”

Between Maggie’s baths, every article of clothing, as well as all the bedding and towels had to be washed (in a wonderful product called Odoban). The curtains got taken down and washed, the rugs got thrown out and replaced with new ones, and the carpets got steam cleaned. It was a torturous week. Unless you’ve had this happen to you firsthand, you have no idea how awful the smell is – and how long it hangs around.

If I never see another skunk, it will be too soon. I will, however, hang on to the recipe for getting the smell of skunk out of a dog, just in case.

Okay, it’s about dogs, again. One hot July night, about 11 p.m., I let the dogs out. Before I could say, HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, there’s a skunk! The poor unfortunate animal was hanging from The Big Black Dog’s mouth. Now, I have smelled skunk along the road, drifting on foggy clouds of exhaust from semis. I have smelled skunk when it hung in the bushes near the latrine at Girl Scout camp. But I am telling you right now, fresh, dead, last gasp, final effort skunk is a gas from hell. The only thing I have ever smelled/tasted/felt that was worse was when I learned you should not move a bloated ground hog carcass with a pitchfork. But that’s a story for another time.

I shouted at poor Big Black Dog, and he dropped the little toxic fur bag and went to stand on the lawn, out of reach. Big Brown Girl Dog came from where she was hiding in the bushes and stood next to him, consoling him about how sad it was to live with humans who had no sense of the value of killing rodents. The smell was so pervasive and so bad it woke the Big Man up – two floors up in the master bedroom. He calls down, “What do you want me to do?” but in a nice way. I said, “You take care of the body, I’ll take care of the dogs.” You see, you can’t just bury a dead skunk somewhere in the garden – the dogs will dig it up. You can’t just throw it in the trash can, the dogs will drag it out. And you can’t throw it across the road because ... well, you get the picture. I gave no more thought to the body, I had an estimated 227 pounds of stinky dog to deal with.

The standard of treatment for a skunk attack is tomato juice baths. I drifted into a defensive, procrastinating reverie as to WHY this is and WHO discovered it – what desperate, foul ancient domestic episode was so intense, so bizarre that a woman (I know it had to be a woman) went into her pantry, got out the tomato juice and poured it on a dog in an effort to get rid of skunk smell. Maybe she had an extensive knowledge of chemistry, which led to a thought process like this, “I have a stinky dog, he got sprayed by a skunk. While my husband is out skinning the skunk to make me a nice hat, I have determined that skunk musk is composed of trans-2-Butenyl thioacetate (12-18 percent), trans-2-Butene-1-thiol (38-44 percent), 3-Methylbutanyl thioaceteate (2-3 percent), 3-Methly-1-butanethiol (18-26 percent), 2-Methlyquinoline (4-11 percent),2-Quinolinemethyl thioacetate (1-4 percent), and 2-Quinolinemethanethiol (3-12 percent) – this was a striped skunk as opposed to a spotted skunk, in which case the chemical composition of the musk would be varied slightly at trans-2-Butene-1-thiol (30-36 percent), 3-Methyl-1-butanethiol (48-66 percent), 2-Phenylethanethiol (2-5 percent), other volatile compounds (less than 1 percent) – discharged with a slight turning motion so that a nearly invisible stream that separated into raindrop sized particles traveled 30-45 degrees toward the dog/target. This volatile spray has bonded with the dog’s skin and fur and will require an acidic bath to be removed. What non-toxic acidic liquid can I apply to the dog that is cheap and readily available, will not harm the dog, but will remove the odor? Perhaps an alpha hydroxy? Malic? Tartaric? Lactic? AH! Tomato juice!”

It’s more likely that sheer desperation caused her to use whatever she had on hand and that she experimented first with peanut butter, Cheese Whiz, oven cleaner and Windex, finally ending up with the tomato stuff when everything else was exhausted.

I have since learned that feminine hygiene douches will also work, but I didn’t have any of those. I do not know how that was discovered but it seems to make sense at a level that tomato sauce does not.

But this wasn’t getting the dogs de-scented. First I accessed the damage. Big Black Dog was absolutely putrid with the scent. Big Brown Girl Dog was smelly and her dense, curly, oily coat was glistening. Little White Dog was faintly stinky, but would still require remediation. Okay, it was going to be a big job. I went to the pantry to do an inventory of available tomato products. I had two cans of tomato paste, one jar of meat sauce, and four jars of gourmet vodka cream sauce (at $6.99 a jar). It was summer – so no tomato soup. Hmm ...

I got the can opener, opened one of the cans of tomato paste. I put the leash on the Big Black Dog and started to “butter” him with the paste. He licked the paste off, every where he could reach, as soon as I put it on. I tried holding his head straight out with one hand and massaged it in with the other. It took the two whole cans to get him iced up, and I tied him to a tree to “soak” while I went to work on the Big Brown Girl Dog. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to use the meat sauce on a curly haired dog, but by the time I was getting to her, it was 1:30 a.m. I rubbed the meat sauce into her coat which she appreciated a great deal, almost forgiving me for dissing her man and his big catch. The little white dog I set in the sink. I poured vodka cream sauce over him. The combination of his white coat and the red sauce gave him a sort of “blush” sauce affect. The vodka cream sauce worked so well, I poured the remaining jars over the other dogs, let them sit for a while and then rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. About 3 a.m., I put the dogs in the basement and went to bed.

The next morning, I let them out and found they still had a funk about them. I also felt mightily sorry for myself. I decided I had to get to my comfort zone, and also get more tomato products. I hopped in the farm truck and headed for the Kentucky Fried Chicken.

So, there I was in the drive thru of the KFC, in my black beat up pick up truck. I was checking my lip gloss in the rear view mirror while the lady at the window got my twister sandwich. In the mirror, I could see the bed of the truck. I saw a black trash bag in the bed. I saw a black and white tail poking out of the trash bag.

I was in the drive thru of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in a beat up pick up with a dead skunk in the bed.

In that moment, I knew I was a redneck.

I was stripped of all pretense. I had a moment of shocking self realization. All my Talbots clothes might as well be men’s Hane’s beefy T’s and stretch pants. My fine four-bedroom immaculate and painstakingly decorated Victorian Farm House might as well have been delivered on wheels. I could feel my bangs getting higher as my ’do morphed into mall hair. I became grammar-impaired and one of my front teeth felt lose.

When the lady at the window offered me the white bag with my foil wrapped twister sandwich, I asked her if I could exchange it for a three-piece original recipe with coleslaw and beans and a Mountain Dew.

I drove home in a dejected haze. I spent the rest of the afternoon bathing dogs and watching Jerry Springer. The phone rang and it was Rippergurl. I explained the sit-chee-ashun. I said, “I am sorry, I am a redneck. There is no denying it.”

“NO,” she said. “NO.”

I said, “No?”

She said, “NO. You are not a redneck. You can’t be.”

I said, “All the evidence points to it. Beat up truck. Skunk. Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

She said. “NO. One thing trumps it all.”

I said, “What is that?”

She said, “You washed your dog with vodka cream sauce at $6.99 a jar. A redneck would never do that. A redneck would never HAVE anything that cost $6.99 to put on pasta.”

She made so much sense. I sighed. I am NOT a redneck. Fer sure.

[If you’re looking for a skunk-smell-removal remedy other than vodka cream sauce, head over to Hank’s blog and read “A Scent of Skunk.” – Eds.]