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The Skunk Remedy Recipe

 
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mistux
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Joined: 25 Jun 2004
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Location: South Bend, Indiana USA

PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2009 1:37 pm    Post subject: The Skunk Remedy Recipe Reply with quote

Source: http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/

If your Dog or pet has been sprayed by a skunk try this:

In a plastic bucket, mix well the following ingredients:

1 quart of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide

1/4 cup of baking soda

1 to 2 teaspoons liquid soap

for very large pets one quart of tepid tap water may be added to enable complete coverage.

Wash pet promptly and thoroughly, work the solution deep into the fur. Let your nose guide you, leave the solution on about 5 minutes or until the odor is gone. Some heavily oiled areas may require a "rinse and repeat" washing.

Skunks usually aim for the face, but try to keep the solution out of the eyes - it stings. If you have any cuts on your hands you might want to wear latex gloves for the same reason.

After treatment, thoroughly rinse your pet with tepid tap water.

Pour the spent solution down the drain with running water.

NEVER, ever, store mixed solution in a closed bottle, sprayer,etc. Pressure will build up until the container bursts. This can cause severe injury.

**********Notes**************

1) Clean plastic mixing containers and utensils are preferred. Metals encourage auto-decomposition of the peroxide.

2) Hydrogen Peroxide 3% solution is usually sold in pint (500ml) bottles, so you'll need two. The 3% grade is often marked "U.S.P.", meaning that it meets the standards for medical use and purity as set forth in the United States Pharmacopoeia.

The use of other strengths/grades is not recommended unless you're a chemist, and even then a trip to the 24-hour drugstore is much better than a trip to the emergency room.

3) Use baking soda, not baking powder. "Arm and Hammer" is one popular brand. Baking soda is also called: Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Bicarbonate, U.S.P., Bicarbonate of Soda, and Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate. Do not confuse any of the above with Washing Soda, which is Sodium Carbonate. Washing Soda is about 100 times more alkaline than Baking Soda and can cause skin burns to both you and your pet.

4) Two preferred brands are "Softsoap" and "Ivory Liquid". As far as auto-decomposition of the peroxide is concerned, the surfactant package in these two is fairly inert. Heavy-duty grease-cutting brands such as "Dawn" are less inert, and hair shampoo is probably the worst.

5) Once mixed, the peroxide slowly breaks down into water and oxygen gas. Thus it gets weaker with time and so it should be used promptly. The exact rate depends on temperature, pH, and catalysts such as trace amounts of metals (iron,etc.) in the soap and/or tap water.

How much pressure will the complete decomposition of 3% hydrogen peroxide produce in a closed container ??? It depends on how full the container is. Assuming negligible solubility of Oxygen in water, a bottle half-full of peroxide will develop about 140 psi. A bottle 3/4 full would develop 420 psi. This can do a lot of damage.

Highly pure hydrogen peroxide decomposes very slowly if kept cool and in a dark place, a few percent a year. The more dilute solutions usually decompose faster (due to impurities in the dilution water) and have a trace of stabilizer added. So why aren't the bottles in the store bloated or bursting ? Look carefully inside the cap... you'll see some very tiny holes in the cap liner to let the oxygen gas escape. A good reason to always store bottles upright.

Look for an expiration date on your peroxide. If you're using stuff which has been sitting around in your medicine cabinet for years, buy fresh peroxide.

6) Tepid: lukewarm.

7) All brand names mentioned in this website are trademarks of their various owners.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Q) How does peroxide, baking soda, and soap get rid of skunk smell ?

A) To get one ingredient out of the way, the soap's just there to help wet the fur and get the oily skunk spray into solution where it can react with the baking soda and peroxide. What happens next is all chemistry, but I'll try to keep it very simple.

First we need a basic understanding of skunk spray. It is mostly composed of compounds called thiols, and acetate derivatives of same. Chemists represent thiols (or mercaptans as they used to be called) with the letters R-S-H. "R" represents the rest of the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the molecule, "S" is a sulfur atom, and "H" is hydrogen. I've put in dashes to show the bonds between them.

The human nose is very sensitive to low molecular weight thiols, a few parts per billion in some cases. Thiols are often found in wastes, and in food which is contaminated or spoiled. Your nose is right above your mouth. So if something you're about to eat doesn't "smell right", little alarm bells should be going off in your brain saying "whoa ! don't eat that or you'll get sick !".

This ability to sense/warn us of very trace amounts of thiols has been exploited by your local natural gas utility. Natural gas is naturally odorless after refining. Just imagine what would happen if you couldn't smell a natural gas leak. A lot of explosions, not to mention the gas that would be wasted. So they put thiols in the gas to make it stink. On purpose. Methane thiol is the simplest organic thiol. The simplest thiol of all is hydrogen sulfide, which is inorganic. Hydrogen sulfide gives rotten eggs their smell.

Methane thiol has one carbon atom and three hydrogens in the "R". Ethane thiol has two carbons and five hydrogens in the "R". Skunk spray has (mostly) 4-6 carbons in the "R".

H3C-CH2-S-H Ethane thiol

H3C-CH2-S-O-C(=O)-CH3 Ethane thioacetate

"Notepad" really isn't good for showing chemical structures, and Deltapoint's HTML editor butchers Notepad even further, so the more complex ones in skunk spray won't be shown here. Actually, all we're concerned about is the S-H part of the molecule, nothing happens to the "R" group ! Don't let the thioacetate confuse you, it's really a thiol in disguise. If you add water to a thioacetate, it splits into a thiol and acetic acid. Many theorize that this explains the observed mysterious "return to stinkiness" of a rain-soaked pet after the traditional tomato juice treatment.

Now that you know all this, let's move on to the baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. The baking soda is there to raise the pH of the brew, that is, to make it more alkaline. I should say "just alkaline enough". Baking soda is a very mild alkali and won't eat holes in your skin like a strong alkali (e.g. lye) would. Raising the pH does three things: 1) It rapidly splits thioacetates into thiols and acetate. 2) It accelerates the reaction between thiol and peroxide. 3) It neutalizes the sulfonic acid produced by 2), above.

Peroxide reacts with thiols in a number of steps, gradually going through the multiple oxidation states of sulfur chemistry until the end product, a sulfonic acid, is produced. This is neutralized to the sodium salt by baking soda. I'm not going to go through all of them in Notepad, but will try to illustrate with a few well- known compounds, using methane thiol (R=CH3) as an example.

The first step in the oxidation is actually a coupling of the thiol to a disulfide.

2 { RSH } + 1/2 O2 ----} RSSR + H2O (notepad does not do arrows, subscripts, etc...)

Whether the S-S bond is broken next or one of the sulfur atoms is further directly oxidized is unclear.

It is known that if one gets to a sulfenic acid RSOH that these are extremely unstable and rapidly oxidize to a sulfinic acid, R-S(=O)-OH

and these are stable enough to be isolated. The oxidation then

progresses to the sulfonic acid R-S(=O)(=O)-O-H, and these are very stable indeed. The only reaction after that is a simple neutralization of the acid with the baking soda to form the sodium salt.

Some other simple sulfur compounds in various oxidation states:

H3C-S(=O)-CH3 dimethyl sulfoxide (topical analgesic)

H3C-S(=O)(=O)-CH3 Dimethyl sulfone (in brocolli)

H3C-O-S(=O)(=O)-O-CH3 Dimethyl sulfate (toxic alkylating agent)

CH2=CH-CH2S(=O)-S-CH2CH=CH2 Allicin (in garlic), antibacterial

CH3SO3H Methanesulfonic acid (catalyst, electroplating chemical)


==============

From Science Friday web site:

Also try 50/50 baking soada and cornstarch.
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