Up close and personal? I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s not even so much a smell as it feels like acid burning your nostrils and eyes and simultaneously stomach churning so you want to gag or vomit until it is cleaned off. I would rather fall face first in a fresh cow pie than be sprayed by a skunk again.
Quite literally. Human and other mammal scent receptors are very sensitive to thiols, sulfur compounds that are frequently found in sources of danger, like rotting corpses, feces, and toxic gas. Skunks evolved their spray to take advantage of this with high concentrations of thiols and compounds that help to adhere to things. It’s like an olfactory flashbang.
My husky got sprayed once on a late night walk. She was so confused – she just wanted to be friends!
She got two jets: one in the facial area and another on her rump. The stuff near her face came out relatively quickly (think a timeline of months), whereas the spray on her butt really got the chance to soak in to her double coat. It would still smell ~5 years later if she got wet, just absurd staying power.
It did eventually fade or, at the very least, became less distinguishable from the general smell of wet dog
Closer to rotten egg than fish but not quite. It’s caused by sulfur compounds similar to those in weed and bad beer as suggested (or beer that’s bottled in clear or green glass and left in the sun - brown and cobalt glass block the UV that causes the compounds to form) but there’s a wider “pallette” of odors in much higher concentration.
This is so neat! Skunk smell is such an iconic, well known, horrendous animal smell in North America. I’ve never considered someone would not know what it smells like!
What does it smell like?
From a distance? Really good weed.
Up close and personal? I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s not even so much a smell as it feels like acid burning your nostrils and eyes and simultaneously stomach churning so you want to gag or vomit until it is cleaned off. I would rather fall face first in a fresh cow pie than be sprayed by a skunk again.
Wow that’s quite the bioweapon!
Quite literally. Human and other mammal scent receptors are very sensitive to thiols, sulfur compounds that are frequently found in sources of danger, like rotting corpses, feces, and toxic gas. Skunks evolved their spray to take advantage of this with high concentrations of thiols and compounds that help to adhere to things. It’s like an olfactory flashbang.
That’s so fascinating. Thanks for the specifics!
My husky got sprayed once on a late night walk. She was so confused – she just wanted to be friends!
She got two jets: one in the facial area and another on her rump. The stuff near her face came out relatively quickly (think a timeline of months), whereas the spray on her butt really got the chance to soak in to her double coat. It would still smell ~5 years later if she got wet, just absurd staying power.
It did eventually fade or, at the very least, became less distinguishable from the general smell of wet dog
So you take a bad beer that’s been sitting in the sun for a few months. You know that smell?
Ramp that up a few orders of magnitude to the extent that it seizes up your breathing and makes your eyes tear up to the point of near blindness.
Thanks. That was not what I was expecting; for some reason I was basing my imaginary skunk smell on the smell of rotten fish.
Closer to rotten egg than fish but not quite. It’s caused by sulfur compounds similar to those in weed and bad beer as suggested (or beer that’s bottled in clear or green glass and left in the sun - brown and cobalt glass block the UV that causes the compounds to form) but there’s a wider “pallette” of odors in much higher concentration.
This is so neat! Skunk smell is such an iconic, well known, horrendous animal smell in North America. I’ve never considered someone would not know what it smells like!
Yeah it’s not really something you export, so I can’t sample it ha ha. Even now that everyone’s telling me it’s still just an imaginary smell to me.