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Lobscouse, the spotted dog (more commonly known as Buddy because the person with veto power, on names, excercised it), had part of a learning experience this morning.

At some point (a bit before 0600) he made the acquaintaince of a juvenile skunk. At first is was just the annoyance of determined barking (which is, for those who've not lived with a dog, not the same as barking at something on the other side of the fence; rather this is harsher, louder and lets one know that something is wrong).

It didn't help that it was directly outside our window.

Skunks are something else, first they are stupid, really stupid. I'm not talking inbred hillbilly stupid. I'm not talking idiot-criminal stupid. I'm not talking out of touch, incumbent-politician stupid. No, I'm talking too dumb to live stupid. The only reason skunks are not extinct, slaughtered in their thousands by superannuated house cats trying to reclaim their glory days of almost managing to catch squirrels and settling for a couple brace of songbirds, or overfed dachshunds who still have some glimmer of being bred to beard badgers in their setts, is they stink.

The only reason they weren't hunted down by hungry, hydrocephalic, oppossums is, The Smell.

Which this one decided to employ shortly after discovering the screen which prevented escape beneath the house.

Maia and I sleep with the window open.

Within short order the entire house was awake, with a nauseated sense of unease, the begginings of a reactive headache, and a sense of, "what the fuck do we do know?"

So we got Buddy away from the side of the house. Not that this helped in the least when it came to the skunk deciding to evacuate. No, being stupid beyond even our imaginings, it was stuck. It's tail was bottle-brushed (which most certainly discouraged one from trying to herd it away from the wall). In the meanwhile we engaged in the first line of killing The Smell.

Hair spray reduces the rate at which it volatilises. So we sprayed the dog, we sprayed the air, we sprayed our hands.

I tried to get some footwear out of our room. I had to give up. It was unbearable. The hall was rank, and that made it hard to get a deep breath. Adding to the hardship was the lingering smell hiding in my nose, so holding my breath was difficult. Breathing in the room was impossible. It was so potent, with such a foul undertone (completely unlike the vague whiff of it one gets on the highways, with the pungent evocation of skunk cabbage), that to breathe it was to lose the power of concentration, as well as inducing nausea, just this side of retching.

We got Buddy into a soft sided kennel. At the worst it's going to have a skunky odor when we want to use it next, but it did keep him from getting away (again, we had him tied up, but he chewed through the rope and went back to badgering the skunk).

Animal Control said that, absent the animal causing an actual emergency; or being injured, they couldn't do anything.

The skunk, well it wasn't going anywhere. Everytime it started to walk away it got a whiff of its musk and panicked, again.

It was going on an hour and a half, not really seeing any other option (I certainly wan't going to try and grab it, being bitten is low on my list of things to do, much less hoping the damn thing didn't have rabies if I.was bitten) we shot it (sub-sonic .22, loud, but not really what one thinks of as a gunshot. The characteristic crack and roll is absent).

So while I was digging a hole, Maia and Marcia were packing the last of the things they needed for their, respective classes, Barry dug out a can of V-8, because tomato juice is a wonder at neutralising the grosser nature of the smell. I filled in the hole (which was too shallow, but I hit a huge rock about two-feet down and there was no way I was going to dig another hole in the hardpan [So. Cal in the summer isn't the moistest of soils], and went to the other side of the house.

Which was about the time the corporal from Animal Control showed up, being as he was in the neighborhood. We told him it was gone, and chatted a bit about the behavior of skunks. Apparently the reaction of juveniles is, usually, better than adults. Adults will spray at the shape of a person (it's about all they can make out), so they have to approache the caged ones people call them to pick up with a towel, because that shape they don't think a threat.

But, we had a dog, a dog is pretty much a guaranteed spray.

He did say that Nature's Miracle works on skunk musk.

The worst part of it is that skunks' odor is so strong they don't, as a rule, turn around to spray it; first thing, they just let go.
So Buddy has some on him, but he didn't get it in the face, so he doesn't associate the abuse his nostrils took (and he knew that whatever it was was on him, seeing him shrimping along the ground, trying to rub it off was cute). If another skunk shows up, we'll probably have the same perfume swamping us in our sleep.

Barry and I went to breakfast (I couldn't stomach the thought of coffee, and Denny's is acceptable for breakfast, even if the coffee does have some robusta in it). Then to the store for a qt. of Nature's Miracle and home to open all the doors and windows, while deploying every fan we own.