Hugo the dog knows many things. He’s adept at sitting, shaking hands, staying, and drinking my morning coffee if I leave it unattended for more than three seconds. He knows the difference between a chair and a bed and makes appropriate use of both, depending on his mood. He becomes downright acrobatic at the sight of a smoked pig’s ear but turns tail if I approach him with a heartworm pill. In his younger days—he’s now eleven—he enjoyed climbing ladders and strolling along the top edge of my couch like a tightrope walker.
What Hugo doesn’t know and is seemingly incapable of learning is how to avoid getting sprayed by skunks. Most people in Missouri note the advent of summer by the sight of full-bloom dogwoods, the return of twilight bats, and the annual migration of highway construction crews. I reach awareness via a pernicious aroma and a highly agitated dog that, more times than not, comes dashing through my open back door and manages to shake viscous drops of skunk goo on curtains, furniture, and slow-moving humans (aka: me).
I’ve been told that skunks give ample warning before spraying. In a reasonable facsimile of behavior exhibited by your average member of Congress and/ or cast member of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, they allegedly chatter, grunt, fluff up their fur, and stamp their feet before emitting a cloud of noxious effluvia. Hugo consistently claims that skunks have never given him a warning, that they hold some type of misplaced vendetta, that he’s an innocent victim of unwarranted assaults. While I’m loath to cast aspersions on his veracity, he’s also told me that dead birds flew straight into his mouth while he was yawning and that he ripped up my socks because they were bullying him.
Lacking hard evidence to the contrary, because I love my dog, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.
If you ask 100 Ozark folks how to eliminate skunk smell, I guarantee that 97 of them will tell you to bathe the dog in tomato juice. This absolutely does not work, and the sole result is that your dog will smell like a plate of spaghetti that was sprayed by a skunk. I’m pretty sure, judging by the frequency of this advice, that 97 out of 100 Ozarkers are employed by a shady, tomato juice cabal.
A vet once gave me a recipe purported to clean a skunked dog. He said to mix a quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide with ¼ cup of baking soda and a tablespoon of Dawn dish detergent. You don rubber gloves and slather this stuff on the dog (avoiding his eyes). Let it sit for a bit, rinse, and then bathe the dog normally. This does work, sort of, if you do it about seventeen times. But you can’t leave the secret formula on your dog too long, or he’ll turn into a platinum blonde and his friends will make fun of him.
Afterward, your dog will only smell a little like a skunk. You, on the other hand, will reek. So will your house. On the upside, the malodorous funk will slightly dissipate in eight or nine months. This timeframe is proof positive of a universal plan, as Hugo averages a spraying once every eight months and twenty-four days.
We don’t get a lot of guests.
This column was originally published in the June 2020 edition of Missouri Life magazine.
