Saturday 13 January, 2007 at 10:06:42 pm
filed under personal
Around 10:30 last night my mother came tearing into the house, near tears, announcing that our dear dog Gusto had just been attacked by a skunk, that he was out in the street, and that she didn’t know where he was. Upon hearing “didn’t know where” my sister immediately began to scream bloody murder, convinced that Gusto had been run away and would never be seen again. To try to make a little progress (and to get away from the shrieking) I stuck my head out the window to look for the dog. He was about ten yards down the street, trying valiantly to fit into a gutter in pursuit of the offending skunk.
Eventually, we were able to get him back on a leash and drag him to the front of the house. The smell was unbelievable - totally unlike the occasional whiff that one gets driving by a skunk in a car. And then the fun began.
Everyone knows that the way to get rid of the smell is to dump tomato juice on the dog. Unfortunately, we had no tomato juice in our house. Fortunately, we did have several boxes of Wolfgang Puck’s Finest Tomato Soup with Basil. We dumped all of this on the dog, but were not able to cover him completely. Frantically trying to deal with the smell, we started grabbing every tomato product we owned and dumping it on the dog - tomato puree, tomato sauce, tomato paste and eventually diced tomatoes. We looked at each other, satisfied that we had dealt with the problem and would soon be able to bring the dog back into the house. After all, he did smell like tomato now. After a moment we realized that he just smelled like a skunk-scented tomato. It was at this point that Gusto began to lick up all of the tomato sauce that hadn’t stuck to him.
We then washed him off with cold water, a thouroughly unpleasant experience for all parties involved, turning gusto from a tomato-and-skunk-scented dog to a cold, wet, tomato-and-skunk-scented dog (just our luck that this would happen on the coldest night of the year), and then proceeded to douse him in Dr. Bronner’s All-One Miracle Soap (the only cleaning product we had in sufficient quantity). At this point, the entire driveway smelled like skunk, tomato, tea-tree oil, eucalyptus and soap suds.
Our Israili neighbor across the street, having heard the commotion from earlier, came out to see what was happening. We asked him if he had any hydrogen peroxide, but discovered that we first had to explain what a skunk was, that it had attacked the dog and not me, and why we needed the hydrogen peroxide (this is the first lapse I have seen in David’s English skills in 13 years). But the lovely perfume we were concocting for the dog was not done yet; after a second wash we rubbed him down with some concoction my sister had located on the internet (apparently the tomato thing is an old wives’ tale - who would have thought?). The main components of this new marinade were vinegar and dish soap (the hydrogen peroxide having been unavailable). Words do not begin to describe the odor.
Eventually we managed to get him dry, warm and into the house (it was now about 12:30), but Gusto was so wired up that we would never be able to get him to go to sleep, and he couldn’t leave the basement as he still smelled atrocious. Fortunately, we keep a supply of (animal) tranquilizer pills stocked for fireworks, large gatherings and other frightening things. I grabbed the bottle from upstairs and gave him one of the pills. He soon began to lie down, and my dad made some crack about how quickly it worked. To pass the time, I started reading the label on the bottle out loud and discovered to my horror that they were not tranquilizers at all, but thyroid medicine. Finally, we managed to locate the real pills and sedate the dog.
He got his hair cut today. They tell us it may be six months before the smell is completely gone.
technorati tags:skunk, dog, family, personal, tomato, H2O2
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d.p.v.t.y
on Wednesday 24 January, 2007 at 9:02:19 pm
haha! i mean.. that sucks.
6 months? naw, its not that bad. my dog got skunk sprayed a few months ago, he stuck his face in the skunks ass. stupid move, dog. his nose hurt like shit for quite a while
Davi
on Saturday 17 February, 2007 at 11:34:45 pm
I dig the new layout. New post maybe?