Prickly Situation

Prickly Situation

We never tend to think of wildlife causing issues with our pets, except for the odd skunk. We today was a new one for the city. Most of my colleagues outside of the city are quite familiar with porcupine quills but today we had a dog walk in with a mouthful. Why are quills an issue. Well they have barbs on them so they tend to travel in one direction since they don’t like to back up. So they are hard to remove and travel through the body. A pet may also have numerous (ie over 100) quills as a result of a given incident. There are reports of migrating quills that years down the road can travel to the chest or other areas and cause serious problems. As a result, we try to be very thorough and remove every single one.

Anaesthesia is needed in order to get a good look around the area affected and also because removing them is painful. All you need to do is imagine a fishhook being pulled out.  We need to get a very good look inside the nostrils, mouth around the eyes or any other region that is affected.

Owners are not always aware of the seriousness of the issue and sometimes will try to remove the quills themselves. In this instance, unfortunately the owner was unable to bring his dog in for 2 days. His dog was not in distress but some of the quills had broken and only a small portion was sticking through the skin. This made it a bit more challenging to find and pull out the offending quills. In the end, we got about 15 quills out and the pet was much happier walking out than when he came in.

Dr Oliver Sterbinsky