Jack meets the “Cat-thing” aka Skunk

Believe it or not my beloved Boxer Jack Brody got sprayed by a skunk in our very own residential backyard. First it was fish in the grass and now a skunk – what next? Mountain Lions? Elephants and bears?

First of all to hear my husband tell this story is hilarious. He lets Jack out at about 1130 for his last-pee-of-the-night and he says Jack makes a bee line for the back wall west of our house (by the way we have an incredibly huge yard – our lot is ¼ acre). He chuckles to himself (my husband, not the dog) because he thinks Jack is chasing a lizard, but he has second thoughts and decides to walk out in the yard to investigate. My husband spots the “cat-thing”, known to us native Americans as a S-K-U-N-K, and yells for Jack to come to him, but it’s too late. Jack comes running to my husband frothing at the mouth. At this point my husband believes Jack is dying and comes to get me (I am asleep at this time) yelling “Jack just got sprayed by the cat-thing and is foaming in his mouth you better come out here!” Of course I am wondering after being awoken from a deep sleep what the heck is a cat-thing? Once I learned he had been sprayed by a skunk we broke out the tomato sauce and cleaned Jack up the best we could. By the time we were done we smelled like skunk and so did our house.

The next morning the skunk smell was still ever present on our hands, on Jack and in our home so I sped off to the grocery store for eight large cans of tomato juice. Jack was given a fifteen minute bath in tomato juice turning his pretty white spots pink, but it worked. The smell was barely perceptible. If there is a moral to this story it would be don’t go in your backyard without a visual inspection for any wild animals or fish first.