No, Discourse. This is not similar to “have you ever had a hitch in your get-along”, let alone to the thread about the Catholic cathedral, which discourse apparently thought better of because that suggestion disappeared while I was typing.
Something smells weird in this room. What smells? – it’s this cat who just jumped on my lap! Why does the cat smell? He’s not acting sick and it’s not a sick-cat smell – wait a minute, he smells like a skunk!
I’ve had dogs get skunked. I’ve never before had a cat get skunked. He didn’t get hit too badly; it’s not too bad to have him in the room, and he doesn’t himself seem bothered by it at all.
I have some dog deskunker, but I don’t know whether it’s safe to use it on a cat. I might just let it wear off, since he didn’t get much of it.
I think for the most part cats are less stupid about skunks than dogs are, and aren’t necessarily adversarial towards or territorial against skunks. Our family cat from when I was a 5 year old kid certainly wasnt:
“Kitty, you can’t possibly be hungry again!”, my Dad says. “I already fed you twice tonight.”
Cat is rather insistent. So he dishes out a couple more spoonfuls and puts it on the back stoop where our cat eats. But is curious enough to watch from an adjoining window.
A moment after he closes the back door, Kitty retreats back from the bowl and in come a family of skunks to eat from the bowl. They nosh and then they touch noses with Kitty (including the cute little baby skunklets) and then they depart.
I think there are exceptions, injured skunks who may spray more indiscriminately because they’re in pain and angry and whatnot and the cat is in the wrong place at the wrong time. But mostly they don’t spray critters who haven’t done a lot to deserve it.
We had one get skunked. It took a while to figure out what was going on. We emerged from the bedroom to find the house filled with a bad odor. Problem was, the odor was so strong we had no sense of where it was stronger. First we thought an electrical fire was happening, then we were just bewildered, and finally somehow we figured out it was one of our several cats. I think our noses were just saturated and the needle was buried at STINK.
I’'m going to let it just wear off; it’s not that bad, he must not have gotten a full hit. I’m not going to try to keep a cat wet for 20 minutes, especially with a solution I don’t want them to eat and therefore needing to prevent them from washing themselves. Though I suspect that the baking soda and the hydrogen peroxide would have mostly cancelled each other out; but while Dawn is less toxic than a lot of things I still don’t want the cat swallowing it.
Yeah, he’s not that bad. For which I am very thankful. Especially as he sleeps on my bed.
Yikes! I hope he hasn’t been sexually harassing a skunk!
Seems unlikely, though; among other reasons, he’s neutered.
Never had a cat get skunked, my dogs have been hit a couple of times.
On a semi-related note, this morning I saw a skunk scamper across the road in front of my house, at 9 am in full sun. That can’t be good. Aren’t they supposed to be sleeping in the day?
One of my cats got hit when she was very young. It was late enough in the evening that I couldn’t go to the pet store for skunk-specific shampoo, so she/me/my other cat just had to put up with it the whole night. The other cat in particular hated it. Every time the young cat would try to get close to her for a snuggle, she’d smack her with this, “Get away from me you stinky kitten!” look on her face.
Someone once told me that if I saw a skunk out in the daytime to stay away from it because it’s probably rabid. I told him I stay away from skunks out any time of the day or night anyway.
I’ve seen them occasionally in the daytime, acting otherwise entirely normal for skunks. I think they may be primarily but not entirely nocturnal. – Google seems to agree with me.
I thought cats were agile enough to jump away before getting skunk sprayed. I’ve never smelled a sprayed cat. Our farm dog got sprayed several times. He just never learned to leave skunks alone.
Dogs will stand there barking until the spray hits their eyes.
5 out of 7 of our dogs have gotten skunked where we live; neither of our two cats ever have. But our cats have always retreated upon seeing any wild creature that was skunk-sized or greater, while our dogs would always want to get closer to said creature.
Well, to be fair, I’m sure that getting skunked does put a hitch in your get-along.
Maybe for the most part… My kids let one of our cats outside by accident; a fearless little guy who gets into everything. He saw a groundhog in the yard and quick as lightning, no hesitation whatsoever, ran after it and followed it down its groundhog hole. I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see the poor cat again, but he popped back up 5 or 10 minutes later, seemingly none the worse for wear. If that had been a skunk he’d have been sprayed for sure.
It seems impossible, but if you live with the smell long enough you get used to it.
I had a dog get a full blast. Long hair shepherd like dog. We did all the smell removal. Including using every home canned tomato I had. Bought many $$ worth more. And commercial skunk odor removal. Tried them all.
Took him to a pro groomer. Threw away the clothes my kid was wearing when he went out and got the dog. De-skunked the kid.
Used pure bleach to de-skunked the mud-room, Laundry room and bathroom. Threw the mop, sponges, cleaning clothes and towels in the burn barrel.
Aired the house out for days.
Cut the kids hair in a really short crew cut. Had the dog shaved.
It was bad folks. As bad as you can get, short of the skunk spraying inside the house.
Whew. We got it cleaned up, finally.
Months later we go on a vacation. Come home after picking pets up at the boarder.
Open the door, and WHAM!! Total skunk smell. It was always there. We just couldn’t smell it anymore.
For the six or seven years we lived WAY up in the woods in W V, our lead cat (oldest) got skunked every 6 -9 months. Peach, an orange tabby, just couldn’t resist Pepe; fortunately, none of our other several cats ever fell for that accent.
When I was a teen, my family got adopted by a stray cat. Jake had clearly been house-trained but my mother didn’t want the whole business with cat litter, etc., so we let Jake out to do his business and he always came back and scratched to be let back in. Then one day, he didn’t. We figured, easy come, easy go. Two or three days later he dragged himself back in looking a bit worse for wear. I don’t recall any particular odor. So we forgot about it until the spring. We had screens that had to be installed every spring (and storm windows that had to installed every fall). We stored them in a shelf suspended in the ceiling in the garage. When we lifted the screens down from that shelf, there was the body of a skunk. With no odor after several months in the garage. We had never noticed anything when we parked.
Way, way back when I was a kid, our B&W tuxedo cat got skunked. Dad washed him out on the back stoop with tomato sauce, rinsed thoroughly, and we wound up with a partially reduced stink on our black and pink cat.