Since this is the place to post mundane pointless stuff, I thought I’d share the following:
Every morning I walk the dogs for about an hour in the woods on various trails. Romeo my sweet, fun-loving boxer managed to get skunked for the second time this summer. He can now proudly claim 18 skunkings in his 5 years of life. Quite an accomplishment.
The thing is, he’s very smart and is able to learn tricks, etc. very quickly. Show him something once or twice and he’s got it down pat. When he gets sprayed by the skunk he will continue to go after it getting sprayed multiple times within less than a minute. Then he rubs his face in the dirt trying to get the juice off of him. His prey drive must be so strong that he cannot put 2 and 2 together in this scenario.
Ugh, you have my sympathy. I had a Husky/Coyote cross and her prey drive was insane. She got skunked almost daily in the summer. She just never cared. The only animals she left alone were porcupines.
You think skunks are bad? Porcupines have gradually extended their range southward. We haven’t seen any, but if I drive north 10 miles or so I begin to see them hit on the road.
A friend’s dog interacted with one recently. The typical interaction has the dog approach the animal and get ten or so quills in his face. Smart dogs turn and run away. My friend’s dog isn’t smart. After the first event he tried to bite the porcupine, getting dozens of quills in his mouth, through his tongue, into his palate, etc. Once his mouth was no longer useful, the dog used his front feet to try to kill the animal.
What a mess. A $450 vet bill to anesthetize the dog and pull the quills.
Yeah, the first time she saw a porcupine she started charging towards it and I hollered at her “Don’t do it! You’ll be sorry!” while I ran as fast as I could after her. I guess she heard something in my voice because she didn’t even try to touch it.
She was a pretty neat dog. She was a rescue from way up northern BC. The coyotes in our area (we lived very rural) would come and try to serenade her. She would pace back and forth at the door, wanting to go out and my other dog would hide under the bed upstairs.
I was young and stupid when I had her and she was always off-leash, running away to hunt. She was quite successful too, catching ground hogs, rabbits, pheasants and mice.
I texted a picture of a skunk to my co-workers and said, “I’ll be a bit late this morning”. They were fine with it.
I keep hydrogen peroxide and baking soda on hand at all times. I tie him up to the fence with a short leash and start sponging him down with the solution. He recognizes the bucket immediately and gets sheepish and very sad. Then he has to sit there tied up for about 20 minutes, which he is not happy about at all and lets me know by constantly whining. Then I get a bucket of warm water and an old bath towel which I soak in the warm water and keep running it over him.
The problem is I can’t get the solution in his eyes, so with his very short boxer snout, I can’t get much of his face. Unfortunately, that’s where he gets the majority of the spray. So his face will stink for months. In fact, he still had a slight aroma from his last encounter in May.
And porcupines…yea he’s gone that route too. Of course, it was on Christmas morning when the only place we could go was the emergency vet $$$$$.
The other dog, Luca (French mastiff/boxer mix) has been sprayed once (he’s the same age) in his life. He learned that lesson immediately. He gets nervous when he sees Romeo get sprayed. He sits like a statue and just watches the show. But on the other hand, he refuses to learn any trick. He’ll sit and shake a paw and that’s it.
Yes! The face is near impossible! I use a washcloth dipped in the solution on the first wash, and after about a week or so I’ll put him (it’s always my boy, never my girl who gets sprayed…) in the tub and wash his front side and face with a baking-soda-based odor control shampoo. It seems to speed up the process of the scent going away completely.
When my boy has been sprayed my girl is nearby enough that the smell drives her crazy, she thinks she’s been sprayed too, and she runs around the backyard and the basement wiping her nose off to try to get rid of the scent. It’s hilarious and sad!
That’s exactly what happened! Luca and my friend’s dog, Otis were sitting like good boys while Romeo was getting skunked. When Romeo came out of the woods in a cloud of stench the other 2 dogs immediately flopped on the ground and started rolling and rubbing their faces through the tall grass. For the next 15 minutes or so, every time I’d look back to check on the dogs, the 2 non-stinky dogs would be throwing themselves in the grass!
