Porcupine Quills: A Veterinary Guide to a Thorny Problem
In this eye-opening episode of Vetsplanation, our experienced veterinary host, Dr. Sugerman, sheds light on an unfortunate occurrence - porcupine quilling. Discover why and how this painful encounter happens and unravel the myths surrounding it. The episode covers everything from the initial discovery of your pet in pain through to treatments, and preventing future traumatic experiences. Don't miss our interesting animal facts about porcupines towards the end!
What You’ll Learn:
Understand what happens when a pet dog encounters a porcupine and gets quilled
How to react when your pet gets quilled and the immediate measures you should take
The misconceptions around dealing with porcupine quills and why it's necessary to take your pet to the vet immediately
The potential risks and complications if quills are not removed completely
Proper aftercare once your pet is back home from the hospital
The importance of preventing your pet from going after porcupines and how to keep them safe
Fascinating facts about porcupines, their habitat, mating behavior, diet, and other interesting traits
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"Porcupines cannot actually throw or shoot their quills. Either the dog has to bite down on the quills or the porcupine can actually use its tail, that's all quilled as well, like a club and kind of swing it around at the pet or at the dog.” - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
"These tiny little barbs will just keep moving deeper and deeper." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
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Read The Transcript:
Dr. Sugerman: [00:00:00] Imagine you've just been woken up early in the morning by your dog whining at you next to the bed.
You look over and you're shocked to wake by the sight of your dog's face full of needles. Quills that is, after they've encountered a porcupine. So listen in as we discuss more about porcupine quills and dogs.
Hi, and welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Dr. Sugerman, and I'm going to teach you about veterinary medicine. In this podcast, we can dive deeper into the understanding of what our pets are going through and break down medical terms into easier to understand chunks of information. Just a quick disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only.
This is not meant to be a diagnosis for your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things. Remember, we are all practicing veterinary medicine and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options and different opinions.
The information I provide here is to help pet parents have a better [00:01:00] understanding about their pets. If you like our podcast, please consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or just somebody else who has pets as well. Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
So let's first talk about how porcupine quilling happens. Contrary to popular belief, porcupines cannot actually throw or shoot their quills. Either the dog has to bite down on the quills or the porcupine can actually use its tail, that's all quilled as well, like a club and kind of swing it around at the pet or at the dog.
I see pets most often in the early mornings for quilling, because of the fact that porcupines are usually nocturnal and they feed at night. It pretty much happens like right after the dog wakes up, it goes outside and, meets the porcupine and... They have a standoff, and usually the porcupine wins.
And just to clarify this can happen to cats as well, but it just usually happens to dogs, not cats. I've only ever seen one cat that's come in with porcupine quills and I think it was, like, whacked in the side by the porcupine. It definitely did [00:02:00] not try to attack it.
So let's talk about what these quills are anyways. They're actually modified hairs, and they have little scales on them that kind of act like the barb on a fish hook to keep it from being able to be pulled out very easily. And this makes the quills go deeper and deeper and can cause a lot of problems, which we're going to discuss later on. So first of all, what should you do if you see that your poor pup has been quilled?
If you have a bunch of quills in your face, the first thing that you're going to try to do is rip them all out, right? And that's what the dog wants to do as well, except for they're trying to use their paws to paw everything out. Pretty much basically what you need to do is you need to stop them from doing that.
That's what's going to help them the most. The best way to do that is if you do have an e-collar at home, and if that's a new term to you an e-collar is like those satellite dishes that we put on their heads to try to keep them from chewing on themselves. Now if you do have one of those unmake it.
So undo the part that folds it together as that little [00:03:00] cone and put it around their neck and then redo it. Don't slip it over their head, but this is the best method to do because if you have this around their neck, they can't paw at their face to be able to get at it. And also you're not going to be in their face as well getting poked by those quills either.
Best case scenario, you have an e-collar, unwrap it, make it flat again, put it around their neck, and then make it back into that circle that satellite dish shape. If you don't have that, which not everybody does keep one of those on hand. The other things are going to be just having somebody hold down their legs so that way they can't push their paws up to their face, we don't want them to drive those quills any farther and ideally in that situation, you have somebody else who can drive you to the vet hospital.
So you can hold their legs down while somebody is driving to the hospital. Versus if you are the only person that's there, one thing you can do is [00:04:00] you can tie like their legs together and I don't mean like hog tie them like together, right next to each other. Just kind of like, they should be able to stand still.
They should be able to like slightly walk. So it's like kind of shoulder width apart, but that way it's harder for them to get one leg up to be able to go at their face while that other one is still on the ground.
I don't, I don't want you to think you have to hog tie them. This should not be constricting, it's just something to try to help keep them from being able to get to their quills while you're able to get to the hospital. So next step, bring them to the vet hospital. You need to have these quills removed. You should expect that we will put them under sedation or put them under anesthesia to have them removed.
This is for a couple of reasons. So quills can be very superficial, which is great, easy to remove, and you only need a little bit of tugging to get them out. And even though it's, only a few, it's still a painful thing. So the more that we have, the more painful it becomes if you imagine just like ripping a hundred quills out of your face, that's really [00:05:00] painful. So some of the nicest dogs are going to get fed up with that. They're going to be very painful and they're going to bite. The second reason why is because some of those quills end up under the skin farther than what you would realize.
And it's really important that we get those out as soon as possible. So when we're going over and we're looking for all of them, we're also feeling their lips. We're feeling between their toes we're feeling under the skin of their upper part of their body for any quills that might be stuck underneath that skin as well.
And why is it that they can't just stay under the skin? You might ask. We talked about how they have these tiny little barbs on the quill and they'll dig deeper and deeper into the skin. It actually goes about one millimeter per hour, if left to its own devices, like it'll just keep going and that's assuming that your dog does not move.
It does not push it in further, there's go pretty deep, but now as your dog moves around more those quills go deeper because it catches on the skin and then pulls it [00:06:00] forward or if your dog is pushing on the quills, then it's going to push on that area and drive those quills deeper in.
We don't want them to stay in there for too long. When it's under the skin, and we can't get them out, this causes a couple of problems. First, it can cause an infection, basically an abscess can form here. And you can hear more about abscesses in episode 44
And these are really difficult to manage because even with antibiotics, the problem, or basically the quill is still under the skin. Even if we deal with the abscess, we still have the problem that's causing the abscess.
This is going to lead to more infections. That's going to lead to more resistance to antibiotics and more scarring that's going to form as well, making it much harder to be able to find these things. It could also lead to widespread infection, and that can be fatal if this infection just goes into the bloodstream and into other organs that unfortunately can kill them.
The second reason is because these quills can migrate. They [00:07:00] have been found to migrate or move to other places like. The lungs, the brain, the trachea, so your windpipe, your joints, the eyeball and the abdomen or the belly, then it can penetrate into some pretty vital organs. They can even cause breathing issues, seizures, eye loss.
I've seen one dog that's lost an eye because it migrated from the side of the face into the back of the eye. Punctures into the intestines, and then abscesses in all of these areas as well, which can also be very life threatening too.
Let's debunk a couple of these myths now. The first one is that quills will just work themselves out of the body. That's really not true. So these tiny little barbs will just keep moving deeper and deeper. The body can possibly form a scar around it that's called a granuloma and it can try to wall it off. That is possible.
There's also the possibility that if they're small enough, maybe the body can destroy them. But the odds of these things [00:08:00] happening are not great. The odds are more likely that it's going to cause more issues. Another myth is that if you cut the quill to deflate it, it's actually easier to pull it out.
That is also not true. Unfortunately, it splinters the quill and it makes it tougher for us to be able to pull out. And it's more likely that parts of that quill are going to be left as well.
The third most common myth is that you can just hold your dog down easily and remove them. And there are many factors that go into this. First of all, like I said, it's painful. You don't want to risk getting bit by the pet who's in so much pain. It's not necessarily their fault.
It's really because it's very painful when this happens. Second, you see the quills on the outside, but you have no idea if they're in the nose, if they're in the mouth, under the tongue, under the skin. And there can be very long ones, and those are normally the ones that you see sticking out. But there can also be very, very short ones, which are very difficult to find.
Sometimes, actually I'd say quite often, I do have to cut into the skin to [00:09:00] remove them, even when I've only seen a couple on the outside of the skin, I've found ones deeper that I've had to cut into the skin to remove them. And the sooner we get them brought in and sedated, the better, the more likely we are to be able to get them out and not leave any, the more time that passes, the deeper they go, and we're not going to be able to feel them.
Like I said, they travel at a rate of a millimeter an hour, if just left to their own devices, but your dog is moving and it's trying to pull them out and you're trying to pull them out now. And so now. Let's say after you try to pull them out for two hours, now that has gone even deeper, and we may not be able to feel them and know that they're there.
So what happens if I don't feel all of them, and I, as the vet, cannot get all of them out? Like I said, this can turn into an abscess. Or it can cause difficulty breathing or seizures, etc. I always let people know that there could be some left that I can't find. Therefore, if your pet has a seizure or if it has an abscess that forms, it's a good idea to [00:10:00] let them know that the dog had been quilled before and that they may be looking for a quill.
Sometimes that's hard, though, to look for that quill. Sometimes if you go into an abscess, sure, we might be able to actually find the quill in the abscess, but if that goes to the brain, that's not easy to find. Or if that goes to the lungs, that's not easy to find. So sometimes you have to do something called a CT scan or an MRI to be able to figure out if there's a foreign object in one of those organs.
And even then we can't really tell what that object is. We just can see that there is something there and we still have to go into surgery, but we need to know where we're going to be able to find that quill. And that can be pretty extensive. If it's in the brain or the lungs doing brain surgery or going into the chest to do surgery on the lungs, you may even have to take a whole lung.
Like it's, it can be pretty, pretty extensive. So I'm going to add one last myth in there, you would think that your pet being hurt by a porcupine, that they would learn their lesson and not go after the [00:11:00] porcupine again, right? That's unfortunately not true though, and they do not learn from their mistakes unfortunately that way.
I've seen many multiple offenders come into the clinic, and I've even had a dog who came in once in the morning who saw me, they went home, later on that night they came back again because they attacked the porcupine again. So after we've gotten all of these quills out, the best thing is a lot of times you'll see a lot of veterinarians putting them on antibiotics, and that's for a couple reasons.
One, they can form an abscess, like we said. There is bacteria, usually bacteria from the pet's own skin, but there's other bacteria as well, like porcupines have lots of bacteria just on their quills from all the environment outside, right? Those things can cause an abscess, so a lot of people will put them on antibiotics.
The other thing is pain medication or some sort of anti inflammatory, because we just pulled a million needles out of their skin, right? That's very painful. You'll usually see them going home with at least some sort of medications. The aftercare at home stuff [00:12:00] is mostly just making sure everything stays clean. If you see any bumps forming to let your veterinarian know. If you see any discharge from one of the holes to let the veterinarian know and then they can usually eat their normal food and stuff when they get home.
It's it's pretty much just monitoring all of those wounds to see if anything happens. And things like those seizures or trouble breathing, that's not something that's going to happen right away. It's not going to be like, they got quilled on Tuesday, and by Friday, they're having seizures. Now, this takes a long time for those things to move.
Again, like it moves one millimeter an hour, roughly. Just left to its own devices. If it goes from the face, and it needs to travel all the way to the brain, that could take weeks, it could take months, it could take years. So you still have to think about those things later on. Months later, if your pet has a seizure, and you're like, Oh, that's right, I forgot, it did have a quilling. We need to look for some sort of a porcupine quill in there. So really prevention is [00:13:00] the key here. Avoiding letting your pets roam at dusk or after dark and trying to help prevent them from going somewhere where porcupine dens are to try to help keep them safe.
All right, let's talk about our animal fact now. It seems only sensible to talk about porcupines for the animal fact. Doesn't it? So I'm going to talk about mating, just a warning, just in case you have any kids listening, but I'm mostly going to be talking about the North American porcupine since that's the most common one here.
North American porcupines are normally found in the coniferous or mixed forest habitats, meaning that they prefer forests that have trees that produce cones. So they're naturally found in Canada, northeastern and western parts of the U. S., and randomly in the northern part of Mexico. Although they like forests, they have also been found in weird places like grasslands and desert shrub communities and even the tundra.
So you might be wondering how they got [00:14:00] such a bizarre name, right? Who came up with the name porcupine? So in Latin, it actually means quilled pig. So it's how they got porcupines. Did you know that also porcupines have about 30, 000 quills on them? That's a lot of quills. Like when your dog attacks a porcupine, we're taking out maybe about three to five hundred quills at a time sometimes, and they still have, a ton more of quills left on them and those quills do grow back.
So don't worry again. They're still going to be able to defend themselves. They are also the second biggest rodent of the U. S. behind the beaver. They weigh on average about 20 pounds. And the North American porcupine is the largest of all of the porcupines.
Now because of like their weight and their size and stuff, you might think that porcupines are really only found on the ground. And while they do foraging on the ground and spend a lot of their time there, they're actually really good climbers. So they've even been found occasionally building nests in trees.
Now, I assumed that they [00:15:00] eat berries and seeds and shrubs, which they do in the summer and the spring, but in the winter, they actually eat the evergreen needles and the inner bark of the tree. That sounds terrible, right? I don't know. It sounds terrible, right? I wouldn't want to live off of bark and pine needles, but they have to live somehow.
And there's not a lot of berries and stuff that are plentiful during the winter, but I'm sure they cannot wait for spring to happen, right? So they usually mate in the fall in the early winter. So when mama is going through pregnancy, she's essentially eating bark and evergreen needles. I'm sure you can imagine would not be great while you're pregnant.
I can imagine there's lots of cravings for things other than pine needles and bark. The courtship process is a little weird as well. So it's very, it's very elaborate. It has a courtship dance and there's lots of vocalizing, which is very common in many species. In porcupines, the [00:16:00] male actually urinates on the female prior to mating.
To each his own, I would assume though, if the male tried to urinate on a female porcupine, she should, she would just smack him with her porcupine tail. But apparently that's, that's what they do. Their gestation, or how long they carry the little baby is about 205 to 217 days.
And the young are usually born in the spring or early summer. For our North American porcupines, they usually only have about one baby, as twins are rare. But kinda cool when they do have them. And are you ready to hear what a baby porcupine is called? It's called a porcupette. Porcupette. Very cute. Don't worry though, even though mom has to endure eating bark and needles and stuff through, through her pregnancy, the majority of it she does not have to endure the quills during birth.
They're actually really soft at birth, so it's not a painful thing. And then over the next couple of days after they're [00:17:00] born, they will start to harden. And then after about two months, the little porcupettes are on their own. And then one more random fact for them. That they are actually really good swimmers as well.
I've never seen a porcupine swim. That was cool to read about. All right, everyone. That is porcupines for you. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me over social media or email me at Suggs@VetsplanationPodcast.com that's S U G G S @ VetsplanationPodcast.com. And if you're interested in supporting my vet tech and I in our endeavor to give you this information that you need about your pet, there will be links in the show notes to try to help us out.
So thank you all again for listening. And as always, please keep your pets happy, healthy, and safe. Thanks guys.