What do you get when a pitbull picks a fight with a porcupine?
A BALD PORCUPINE!
Comments: Apart from the fact that the poor pooch pictured above is mislabeled as a pit bull (she's actually a bull terrier), these pictures are authentic. They were originally posted on a community bulletin board by the dog's owner on May 25, 2005. The terrier's name is Inca.
"Thousands of quills were embedded even in her tongue," her owner explained. "The vets worked for quite some time to get quills out and even still could not get them all. The one's that are left will work themselves out over time. Inca is home and on antibiotics and pain killers."
In a follow-up post dated July 13, Inca's owner reported that "she is just fine and has just the odd broken bit come out once in awhile. Other than that she is back to her old self."
Moral of the story: Dogs and porcupines don't mix.
from About.com Urban Legends and Folklore
Now for some solid information about removing porcupine quills, see article at The Pet Center.com
Having watched our own dog and my mother's dog suffer with their first encounter with porcupines, I'm in favor of taking the dog to the vet and letting them anesthisize the dog, remove the quills rather than try to pull them out myself. We had a neighbor who's dog encountered a porcupine and the neighbor used a treatment that I wouldn't recommend or so we heard when we inquired if the dog was okay. Had to do with dousing the dog with gasoline and yanking out the quills. Not sure the point of using gasoline, but hey - it's still a shade of the wild west where we live, so who knows where this remedy came from over the generations.
