they smell bad IRL
They smell about as bad as a feral cat. What they do is they make you smell bad if you scare them.
Comment on xkcd #3217: Home Remedies
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 2 days agoNo… I know of skunks from the cartoon Pépé the Skunk, but I never really reconnected that with reality, as in, they smell bad IRL, that’s not just a cartoon thing. So that prevented me from identifying the xkcd being about grandma’s remedies.
marcos@lemmy.world 2 days ago
hyperencabulator@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Not just bad either, vomit-inducing, appetite-destroying-bad. It’s their defense mechanism from large things with sharp teeth that haven’t eaten in 24h. The smell stays on you and anything the liquid touches for weeks. Burn the clothes, wait for new skin cells to replace the existing ones. Pray it isn’t on something like your car or place of residence.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
We have a skunk that roams around our back yard. Our dog got within a foot of it once, luckily didn’t get spayed. I can tell when he’s outside, just the lingering odor of their spray fills the entire outdoors. It is incredible how potently disgusting their actual spray is.
emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Skunks smell fine, they just have the ability to spray predators with a scent that smells fucking awful. The skunk itself doesn’t usually smell like that though, and if they aren’t afraid for their life they’re actually super friendly cuddly creatures. They’re like cats with a stinkbomb cannon.
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 1 day ago
I didn’t know all that, thanks for the skunk lore !