I’ve been meaning to jot down this for a while now even though it isn’t really skunk season. I’m not a vet; this is a purely anecdotal solution to the problem of dogs getting sprayed by a skunk. Once upon a time we had an English bulldog named Tyson. He was dumb. And slobbered a lot. And he was dumb. But we loved him. We had a couple acres of land and the folks around us all had more acres, so it felt like the country.
Tyson loved to ride in cars. If a visitor left a car door open he would jump in and settle his girth and I would have to lift his sorry carcass out. But we loved him.
Anyway, one evening we came home and Tyson shout out of the car into the dark, barking furiously. I was concerned, because Tyson had no fear of anything. (This came in handy one day when a rottweiler attacked us and Tyson locked his jaw on his arm and refused to let him go until he submitted, but it was annoying when he attacked the wheel well of a passing Prius. Tyson was – somehow – unharmed.) I grabbed a flashlight to make sure he wasn’t going after a mountain lion or something but by the time I got back out all I could see was Tyson foaming at the mouth and scratching his face furiously. As I approached, I smelled the reason why.
I didn’t know what to do but I could tell his eyes were burning, so I carried him into the bathtub and rinsed his face off. Then we ran to Walmart and found some de-skunking shampoo and, presto, the house smelled like wet skunky dog for the next two weeks. Traps were set for the skunk but, alas, he was too canny.
So a couple of weeks later, despite some precautions, Tyson got skunk sprayed again. But like a flash of wisdom from Mt Olympus, it dawned on me that if I put him in the bath again, we would have to smell the delightful odor that Glade has yet to bottle: wet skunky dog. Instead of getting him wet, I grabbed baby powder out of the nursery and covered him with it. Then I brushed it out of his fur.
Skunks basically spray an oily secretion, and adding water to the mix just doesn’t work (or it didn’t for me). Once the dog gets wet you are toast. You’re going to smell it for weeks. But if you can absorb the skunk oils with some sort of powder, then you can brush that powder off and it will greatly reduce the intensity of the smell.
I’ve heard about tomato baths and we tried some different shampoos, but at the end of the day we just decided that powders work better (and they’re cheap). I’m guessing that you could use baking soda or corn starch as well, but we always have baby powder lying around. Over the last few years we haven’t had nearly as bad a case as that first one, but my hound has gotten mildly sprayed a time or two, and we always go back to the baby powder.
So there you go. No water, just baby powder.
Nathan Writes 