Chemist Has The Power To Tame Skunk's Spray

November 25, 1994|By Peter Kendall, Tribune Staff Writer.

Salk conquered polio. Einstein unraveled relativity. And Krebaum? Well, Paul Krebaum, it appears, has developed the first home remedy for skunk spray.

If ever an idea was in the air, it was this: How do you get rid of the smell that comes from two tiny but ingenious glands at the business end of a skunk.

A garden hose is impotent, soap is utterly useless, and tomato juice is a quaint old wives' tale that has left many people with skunk-sprayed dogs that not only stink, but are pink.

But Krebaum's formula, distributed nationally in recent months on e-mail and in state agriculture department bulletins, is winning over converts who thought the only viable antidote was the passage of time.

The story of how Krebaum, a Lisle chemist, has conquered the fetid, putrid odor of skunk is a simple tale of necessity being the mother invention.

But, alas, Krebaum's formula will never bring riches to its inventor, for the solution is trapped within a cruel chemical Catch-22.

The very chemical properties that make his formula deodorize skunk spray make it impossible to package. It will burst out of any bottle.

If the story of Krebaum's formula is ever made into a movie, the first scene will show Krebaum working away in his lab at Molex Inc. in Lisle. His face is screwed up as he smells something bad.

He is doing research using chemicals called thiols-some of the nastiest smelling chemicals around.

Thiols are produced by many things, including the degradation of proteins. Thiols are responsible for the odors that comes from decomposing flesh and fecal matter.

Most animals have a deep-seated repulsion to thiols, a gift of evolution that keeps them from eating things that will make them ill.

Using basic chemistry knowledge, Krebaum figured out a way to get these foul smelling thiols out of his lab by changing them into other compounds. The trick was oxidation-getting oxygen molecules to bond with thiols and change them into things that didn't smell bad at all.

To do that, he made a solution of simple ingredients-hydrogen peroxide and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)-that did the trick quite well. The solution threw off oxygen like a dog shakes off water, and some of that oxygen grabbed onto the thiols and neutralized them.

Meanwhile, in Lisle and elsewhere, evolution had been chugging along for eons and produced an animal that scientists call mephitis mephitis, the common striped skunk. Natural selection led the skunk to develop a spray that exploits other animals' aversion to thiols. Skunk spray is, fundamentally, essence of putrification.

But fate never would bring mephitis mephitis and Paul Krebaum together, at least not directly. Krebaum has himself never smelled skunk spray at any greater concentration than that lingering in the air on a country road.

There were, instead, intermediaries-one of Krebaum's colleagues and a pet cat.

"He came in to work and said his cat had an encounter with a skunk," Krebaum recalled. "He said he had tried tomato juice, and it didn't work, and the cat still wasn't able to come into the house."

Krebaum knew skunk spray was made of thiols ("general knowledge," he calls it), and suggested using a variation of the formula he used for getting rid of thiols in the lab.

"He came back the next day and said the stuff worked like magic, that every trace of skunk odor is completely gone from the cat," Krebaum said.

The variation he developed for the cat was this: 1 quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide, which costs about $2 at a drugstore; 1/4 cup of baking soda; and 1 teaspoon of liquid soap, which breaks up the oils in the skunk spray and allows the other ingredients in the solution to do their stuff. The solution should be rinsed off the pet with tap water.

In October 1993, Chemical and Engineering News published Krebaum's formula.

One of the most interested readers of the article was Tom McCutcheon, who was then with the West Virginia Department of Agriculture. McCutcheon, a plant pest biologist, was something of an answer man for callers to the department.

"We'd get probably a dozen calls a year, `What do we do, our pet's been sprayed by a skunk,' " McCutcheon said. "Tomato juice is the old remedy. Everybody would say, `We've tried that, and it doesn't work at all.' We really didn't have a remedy."

When he read of Krebaum's formula, he was skeptical. Over the years, he had learned never to recomend anything he hadn't tried himself, but getting sprayed by a skunk posed practical difficulties.

"I asked my dog if she'd volunteer, but she said no," McCutcheon said.

It was while driving last February through the hickory and oak forests of Roane County, West Virginia, that McCutcheon spotted a road-killed skunk. More hit than run over and preserved by the late winter chill, the skunk was in fine shape.