The fun way to have a bath,
©voyager, all rights reserved
Jack has been skunked!
I was having trouble sleeping last night and Jack was (mostly) staying awake to keep me company. Around 2:30 am he asked to go out for a pee so I let him and that’s when it happened. Right in our own yard and 5 meters from our front door. He got a big dose too with sticky, stinky skunk goo from his nose to his tail.
There’s a fairly simple recipe that works well to break up the oils in skunk spray and I went around the house gathering supplies. Pails of water, dog towels, Vaseline (to keep water out of his eyes), dish soap, baking soda and….no peroxide. No Peroxide! That’s the liquid into which you add the dish soap and baking soda to make the shampoo. It’s essential, so I got in the car and started driving around to convenience stores trying to find some. We live in a fairly small city of about 40,000 people and none of the big stores are open 24 hours. Finally, at my 5th stop I found 2 overpriced small bottles of peroxide, which was not quite enough, but it felt like I’d just won the lottery.
We bathed him in the back yard and got enough of the smell off that Jack was allowed back inside. It was almost 5 am by the time we were finished and fell into bed. Jack wisely slept in his dog bed instead of trying to get up with us. At 8:30 the alarm went off and I trudged to the drugstore to stock up on peroxide and then I took Jack down to the river, waded in wearing old sneakers and repeated the shampoo and let him rinse himself off with a frolic instead of the unpleasantness of having buckets of water (warm water!) poured all over you.
I still have a stinky pile of towels plus the clothes we were wearing to wash, but that’s just going to have to wait. I need sleep first and that’s exactly what I’m going to do now. Night, night.
What an adventure!
“Do not play with stink-kitty” is a good rule for dogs. Mine learned that the stink-kitty meant a bath might happen if they didn’t steer well clear. Baths were horrible and grounds for wailing and whining -- the stink-kitty was no big deal. Daddy was just no damn fun.
Poor Jack and poor you!
Certainly an experience both you and Jack would have rather not had. Sweet and non-smelly dreams. I think I should be happy no skunks have evolved on this side of the pond.
I like the picture, though.
Oh no, all my sympathies to you both! Cantemahto was a terrible one for getting skunked, I just could not convince him that those black and white creatures were any different from the black and white creatures we had in the house (cats). I’ve had too many nights like that.
I could probably produce a liquid soap and bill it as removing stink-kitty smell. I could be the next Jim Bakker! Tactical post-apocalypse stink-kitty thwarting fluid!
I’ve had a neighborhood skunk this spring/summer. I live in an old city neighborhood, so no close woods/open areas. Even spotted it in the afternoon heading down parallel to the sidewalk across the street from me. Got many whiffs of it before the new HVAC was installed, and I closed all the windows. Still in the area, as there was a lingering smell in the garage when I went out to put my new lawn mower together this morning. More dead skunks than I recall on the city roads, so they may be trying to/adapting to “city life”.
My sympathies, voyager.
No skunks here, so I luckily never had an “adventure” like this with our dogs.
The only time I have seen a skunk was when I was in Idaho in 1999, and only briefly.
Lots of symathy voyager, and sweet dreams.
The nearest I’ve come to that is our springer spaniel who would roll in fox or badger shit if she could. She had to be washed in streams with washing-up liquid more than once when we were renting holiday cottages.