Skunk'd

We returned from our friends house late Friday night, a little bleary-eyed and sleepy, and Mike let the dog out. The minute the dog walked back into the house, we knew from the pungent and sulfury aroma that he'd been sprayed by a skunk. Up close, the odor was like very strong sulfury onions mixed with funky musk. Some people describe it as rotten eggs and garlic. Sometimes, when you smell it along the road or in the woods, it's a sort of familiar and not totally unpleasant smell. In close quarters, it is a smell that repeatedly assaults the nose. It does not diminish. With some smells, pleasant ones, repeated smelling dulls the effect. Not so with skunk.

I hopped on the computer and looked up the Mythbusters episode where they tested skunk smell remedies. Tomato juice was listed as "plausible" though not particularly effective. They also tested beer, and a commercial preparation. The formula that was shown to work was 1 qt 3% hydrogen peroxide, plus 1/4 c baking soda, plus 1 tsp dish soap. By the time I came out of the office, Mike already had all of the tomato products in the house blending in the food processor. I offered my findings, and we quickly made up a batch of the solution as well. Mike headed into the shower (it was after 11:00 pm by then) with his arsenal and the confused dog.

I went to bed. During the night, I woke up several times with the smell still in my nose. We guessed too late that the skunk had sprayed the bushes just outside our bedroom window and we'd been pulling more smell in with the fan all night. When I got out of bed, Mike was asleep on the living room sofa (to try to get away from the smell) and the dog was on several layers of towels in the kitchen, without his collar on. In the bathroom, the shower walls were still speckled with tomato bits and decorated with dog hair. The floor was littered with hairy plastic cups and tomatoey containers.

Two days later, the smell is pretty much gone from the inside of the house. The dog is exceptionally fluffy (Mike used my shampoo on him instead of dog shampoo) and ejecting hair like an abandoned chia pet, but he doesn't smell like anything. (Except maybe Axe body spray, which Mike used to nuke the last whiffs of skunk on his collar.) There is a faint whiff of skunk on one of my totebags, which he must have brushed against on his way in. It is hanging outside on a hook until the smell fades. Other than that, we are almost smell-free.