Growing up in the mountains, we either learned from experience the hard way or were taught what not to do in advance. Camping and the do’s and don’ts were a part of outdoor school in 6th grade back then. Orienteering, firearms shooting, first aid, edible wild plants, all that goodness they won’t teach now for liability reasons and/or that’ll get you fired and jailed for nowadays. It was a good primer for when you went on backpacking and camping jamborees in Boy Scouts a couple years down the road. And Mr. Skunk De Pew is not a fella you want to irritate up close. We had our family mutt as a kid who would go off on her little all-day ‘let’s see what I can chase down’ sessions there on the ridges, and more than once she came home after cornering a skunk. She usually spent a few days sleeping in the basement until she had enough baths to smell fragrant but tolerable, and come back upstairs. (FYI: milk and tomato juice baths to get the stank off from a skunk spraying are old wives’ tales. It’s like dye from the husk of a freshly dropped walnut or the stalk berries from an Indian paint brush - it’s just plain gotta wear itself off. It all gets into the pores of your skin.)
Mom and dad spent the next three days driving the logging trails trying to find them to no avail. On the third day, they drove into the teeny little town about 3 miles away to have supper in the bar. They knew the bar owner and when they got inside, they found the two dogs sleeping behind the bar.
The dogs had wandered into the town so the owner brought them in and fed them. Evidently they had quite an adventure since both of them smelled of skunk spray and the shepherd had porcupine quills in his face..........LOL!
Several years ago our dog cornered a skunk and got a good spraying.
I had heard about tomato juice but didn’t have any. But I did have ketchup!
We lived on a river bank. I put on rubber gloves and rubbed a bottle of ketchup on him. Then through him in the swift -flowing river. He came back for more. I did it three times.
Worked pretty good!
Although if anyone had seen me throwing what looked like a bloody dog in the river, they may have contacted authorities.