Camels in the Mist

It’s been a while since i’ve blogged (sorry), and i’ve been kinda wondering what to come back writing with, especially since i left you all on such a boring topic. Oh well.

So, one of my roommates has a dog. Furthermore, where we live is moderately near to Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver, which unbeknownst to me, is the home of several skunks in addition to whatever wildlife may choose to congregate there. Even so, apparently one such skunk decided to wander into our back yard and sprayed the dog. Shortly before midnight last night.

We couldn’t leave the poor dog outside, and one of my other roommates had an interview the next morning that he couldn’t afford to go to smelling like skunk. Now apparently a “great” home remedy for de-skunking a pet is to wash it in tomato juice. So that’s what we did. One of us went out and had a fun time looking for a 24-hour store (since it was past midnight and a lot of the usual suspects that sold tomato-products were closed) and came back at 1 am with a variety of tomato paste, tomato juice, and dog shampoo.

So, it’s well past midnight and we spend an hour alternating rubbing the dog down with tomato juice, tomato paste, and rinsing it off. Poor dog. He took it like a champ tho, he had more fun licking it off than we did rubbing it on, is all i can say. We did this in the back yard because we didn’t want to stink up the bathroom. I wonder what our neighbors will be saying if any of them happened to peek our their windows at 2:00am in the morning, to see a bunch of guys rubbing a (bloody?) red dog down. Creepy?

So, before i wrote this entry, i decided to do just a little research on it. Apparently tomato juice isn’t the greatest solution: What it does is covers up the skunk smell with an equally powerful smell of tomato. Rubbing it in will cause the dog to smell like tomato, masking the skunk smell. A little surfing online gives this as a proper de-skunking solution:

• 1 quart (3 %) hydrogen peroxide
• 1/2 cup baking soda
• 1 or 2 teaspoons dishwashing detergent

I hope we’ll never find need to put this knowledge to use for a second de-skunking operation x_x.

Currently Listening to:
[ Unleashed/Danny the Dog Soundtrack ] Massive Attack - Collar Stays On

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 1:47 pm by Xore and is filed under All, People, Humor, Life, Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.