For a week, eat nothing but mass quanties of boiled eggs, turnip greens, curry powder and garlic. On day 7, drink a mixture of unfiltered water from the Ganges mixed with liquified Ex Lax. Capture the resulting diarrhea in a 20 gallon metal container. When full, seal the container and store it in the trunk of your car. Drive said car to Death Valley and park it in the middle of the desert for 30 days. Multiply the resulting stench by 10 and you have something approaching skunk.
Acrid. Imagine a cross between burned coffee and an electrical fire, for starters. Only bad.
For a reference point you might be more familiar with–have you smelled natural gas (from a stove, heater, or whatever)? The chemical agent they use to scent it is related to skunk scent, chosen because it is detectable in really minute amounts–less than one part per billion. The thiols in skunk scent can be detected at ~10 parts per billion.
Skunks have about 15 cm[sup]3[/sup] of this stuff available to spray (when fully loaded). If I’ve done various conversions right, and assuming the stuff evaporates and spreads evenly, that’s enough to be detectable throughout a 15000 m[sup]3[/sup] space. (To put that in traditional football field measurements, it’s a volume of air about 10 feet deep over an entire American football field–again, assuming I didn’t misplace decimals somewhere.)
I’ve read that foxes mark their territory with a scent reminiscent of skunk spray. Did you actually see the skunk or did you just smell it?
I have smelled both foxes and skunks, and yes, fox urine smells like skunk spray. In fact, I’ve heard that the word “skunk” comes from a Native term meaning urinating fox.
No, I didn’t see it. There are foxes around here too, but I sure doubt it was fox pee: way too strong.
Honestly, you’re lucky not to be familiar with that odor.
Skunks are such bastards!
One lives (or visits frequently) under my deck. I tread carefully back there.
Come to Indiana in the spring! They are among the top three of road kill and when they get smushed their scent gland empties. Carries quite a distance.
:eek:
The thing that gets me is that you can drive past a skunk road kill without even touching the carcass and the smell of skunk permeates your car for 10 or 20 minutes. And that’s just a drive by. Imagine if you actually hit the damned thing! (Which I never have, thankfully.)
Am I the only person who actually likes the smell of skunk?
Oh, I’ve run over a (fairly fresh) roadkill skunk…what fun! I was cruising along CA 4 between Arnold and Calaveras Big Trees, came around a curve, and there was a dead skunk, not quite in the middle of the road. I didn’t have time to swerve. Hit it with both tires on one side.
Luckily there was a self serve car wash in Arnold–I got several cleaning products at the supermarket and washed the side/underside of my 4Runner multiple times. There was still a whiff of skunk leftover, but I managed to clear that out by driving for three or four hours through the mountains with all the windows open.
(missed the edit window…)
In my camping experience I’ve found that if you just leave them alone, skunks will wander right by without a problem*. If you react and stress them out, that’s when there might be trouble. One evening at Pt. Reyes a skunk moseyed through our campsite–we froze and it wandered under the picnic table where we were seated and kept on going. Just a minute or two later there were shrieks of horror from the campsite next to ours–everyone ran for the hills when the skunk paid them a visit.
*As long as you don’t leave food out for them to get into.
Just for Laughs skunk gags. Too funny.
You are not. Manly, yes, but I like it too. 
I find it very similar to coffee, garlic, beer, mushrooms, skunky weed…all kinds of tasty things.
My gentleman friend actually got kind of mad at me when I first told him I liked the smell of skunk, like he just couldn’t believe someone could be so gross. Oddly, we are still together.
My dad learned the secret to driving skunks out from under decks. You can’t use violence or your whole house will be skunked; let the skunk live there, and it will start to stink anyway.
The secret is: talk radio. Seriously.
Take a radio and turn it to one of those talk radio call-in programs. NOT to a music station - skunks can get used to music, but the sound of yammering human voices annoys them no end - place radio where the skunk can hear it; leave radio on day & night. The skunk will move out. [Presumably, before the yammering drives you crazy!]
If a skunk actually sprayed your window screen you’d be near death. It’s likely the skunk was 50 feet away.
What’s the LD50 on skunk spray?
I don’t have a figure for skunk spray itself; it’s actually a mix of various thiols and other stuff, and I imagine it would be pretty difficult to determine. I did find numbers for t-butyl mercaptan, one of the components, which is also used to scent natural gas, as I mentioned in a previous post.
The LD50 is 4,729 mg/kg. Note, however, that LD50 is a measure of the amount consumed to induce toxicity. It’s how much of the stuff causes 50% fatal reactions if taken orally.
I’ll give you time to ponder drinking nearly half a kilogram of skunk spray.
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Done? Okay, what you’re probably more interested in is the LC50 value, which is the concentration at which the chemical is 50% lethal. It’s harder to pin down, but the safety data sheet I found reports various LC50s from rodent tests, ranging from 16500 parts per million to 26643 ppm for 4 hours of exposure. (Remember that you can smell this stuff at 2 parts per billion, so this is millions of times that concentration, over the course of hours. Makes me wonder if the rats’ cause of death wasn’t poisoning, but suicide.)
Here’s the safety data sheet [PDF] I got this info from: http://www.cpchem.com/msds/100000013356_SDS_JP_EN.PDF
Wait. Rush Limbaugh is actually useful for something? Wow, ignorance fought!
Remember to check the skunk’s political views first. You don’t want to make the situation worse.