The Cautionary Tale of Our Dog’s Altercation With a Porcupine
Key takeaways:
When dogs face off against porcupines, the dog never wins.
Porcupine quills can be deadly, depending on where they land.
A dog who has been hurt by a porcupine should immediately get medical assistance.
Even now — more than 3 years after Daisy, an American Staffordshire terrier, had an unfortunate tangle with a porcupine — owner Katie Leonard still pulls the occasional quill from the dog’s body.
“It doesn’t surprise us anymore,” says Katie, a 41-year-old teacher living in Baltimore. “She’s part porcupine.”
On Thanksgiving weekend 2020, Katie and her husband, Franklin Donn, were visiting western New York. They decided to take a short walk while dinner was in the oven. Their dogs, Daisy and Dexter, always stayed close to them, so they allowed them out without leashes.
Something caught Dexter’s eye — Katie thinks he saw a deer. He dashed into the woods, with Daisy right behind him.
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“The next thing we knew, Daisy had this porcupine in her mouth, and she was shaking it,” Kate says.
Frank ordered Daisy to drop the animal. She did, but it was too late. Her face and body had been pricked with countless quills. Daisy rolled on the ground, possibly trying to detach the sharp points, but that drove them deeper into her flesh.
Barbed porcupine quills penetrated the dog’s flesh
The family rushed to a veterinary hospital in Buffalo. Dexter, who had quills in his paws, whined the entire drive. Daisy was silent, slipping in and out of consciousness.
Both dogs were admitted to the hospital. Dexter was quill free within hours and released.
Daisy’s situation was more perilous. Doctors worked on her all night, removing the quills they could see. They knew many more were inside Daisy’s body.
“It was the worst any of them had ever seen,” Katie says. “I don’t remember the exact words they used, but I do remember the outlook wasn’t good. It was clear they thought she wouldn’t make it.”
The couple went home to Baltimore. Daisy slept during the trip, calmed by pain medications. That night, Daisy seemed to have trouble breathing. Katie rushed the dog to a nearby animal hospital, waiting in her car for hours since COVID-19 protocols prevented her from going inside.
Veterinarians said one of Daisy’s lungs had collapsed. Dozens of quills were piercing her heart, lung, liver, spleen, pancreas, kidneys, and diaphragm.
![“We were determined to get her [Daisy] whatever care she needed.” — Katie Leonard](https://images.ctfassets.net/4f3rgqwzdznj/2l9KzNINThyTRS5lILKCPe/cda501525b3ae97b9a6de1e81b08e41f/pet_care_porcupine_quote_1a.png)
“I didn’t realize how extreme it was — that she’d swallowed the quills, that all of her organs were affected,” Katie says. “But we were determined to get her whatever care she needed.”
Love at first sight, despite the barking
Katie and Franklin had adopted Daisy when she was about a year old. Her original owner had wanted a guard dog and was disappointed with the pup’s gentle nature. He was trying to toughen her by affixing “a big hardware store chain around her neck,” Katie says, and leaving her outside his rowhouse.
Katie and Franklin’s friend saw the dog so tethered. The dog’s owner noticed the stranger’s interest and immediately offered to give the animal away, saying something like, “You like her? You can have her. I was told she was a pit, but she never grew into what I expected. She’s too nice. I put this chain on her to make her stronger, but it didn’t work.”
The couple’s friend quickly agreed to take the pup. She then posted photos of the dog on Facebook asking if someone could foster the frightened animal until a permanent home could be found.
Katie and Franklin already had Dexter, but they wanted to expand their menagerie. When Katie met Daisy, “this little dog barked at me for an hour straight — the second I came into the door.” Still, there was an immediate bond, Katie says. This dog was meant to be theirs.
“We didn’t use the word ‘foster’ because we knew that if she came into our lives, she wasn’t leaving,” Katie says. “She’s just the best thing in the world.”
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Dexter and Daisy became fast friends. Before Daisy’s adoption, Dexter had severe separation anxiety whenever Katie and Franklin left the house. “We’d see him on the dog camera, sitting on the couch, looking out the window, waiting for us to come home and howling. It was heartbreaking,” Katie says. “We barely went out in the evening together for the first year of his life.”
Adding Daisy to the mix changed that. “We thought he missed us, but he just needed company,” Katie says.
American Staffordshire terriers like Daisy are generally intelligent and people oriented. Considered a subset of the pitbull, this breed has historically been used to hunt game and provide protection.
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Daisy has shown herself to be true to her breed before and after the porcupine, Katie says. She’s “a little hunter,” having killed a few rats, bitten a 5-foot-long snake in half, and tangled with a raccoon, which left her with a scratch on her eye, Katie says.
A vet school trauma center gave them confidence that Daisy could survive
When veterinarians at the first Baltimore veterinary hospital concluded that they didn’t have the resources to do more for Daisy, Katie and Franklin drove 2 hours to the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Veterinary Hospital in Philadelphia.
“We weren’t feeling very confident until we got to Ryan,” Katie says, since it’s one of the nation’s top-ranked veterinary schools.
Porcupines can have as many as 30,000 quills, which are actually long hairs coated with keratin that keeps them hard and sharp. Each quill has a barb at the end that embeds itself under the skin of the porcupine’s enemy and lets the quills migrate throughout the body. In addition to damaging the internal organs, the quills also carry infection-causing bacteria.
Dog-porcupine run-ins can be deadly.
Daisy spent 12 days in the hospital. During the first 5-hour surgery, surgeons carefully removed quills from Daisy’s vital organs. Some had penetrated a lung lobe, which required doctors to perform a lung lobectomy.
A few days after the surgery, Daisy showed signs of abdominal discomfort and swelling. Surgeons needed to go in again, removing more quills and repairing a second collapsed lung.
Because of COVID restrictions, Katie and Franklin couldn’t visit Daisy. Still, they appreciated the hospital staff’s efforts to keep them updated. “Every single morning and every evening, I had a call from them,” Katie says.
Katie gave Daisy’s care team hand-sewn masks with a dog-print fabric and T-shirts printed with the dog’s photo.The care team returned the love, buying Daisy T-shirts and a bandana. “She became a mini-celebrity,” Katie says.
Pet insurance covered much of the costly ordeal
Migrating quills continued to be a problem after Daisy’s hospital discharge. Katie says she and Daisy returned to hospital for further care at least 8 times.
“I’d wake up at 4:30 in the morning, take her in the car [to the veterinary hospital], drive to work, teach all day, drive back after school, and pick her up and bring her home,” Katie says. “She had a few overnights.”
Katie estimates that Daisy’s care cost about $38,000. The family’s pet insurance policy covered about 90% of that. (For an alternative view, see this article about a dog owner who decided the cost of pet insurance wasn’t worth it.)
“I am so grateful we had great pet insurance when this happened,” Katie says. “I’ll always make sure my pets are insured.”
When Katie and Franklin adopted Daisy, their vet said that the 25-lb pup was almost fully grown. She has doubled in size since then, weighing in at 55 lbs. But even with the added pounds and muscular frame, Daisy isn’t intimidating, Katie says. “She looks like a beautiful Egyptian pharaoh,” she says. “She has soulful eyes with the best natural black eyeliner.”
Since the incident, the family has moved to a more rural section of Maryland so Dexter and Daisy have room to run safely. Quills still migrate to the surface and poke through Daisy’s skin. Most recently, one popped out near her eye.
But Katie has become skilled at removing the barbs, and Daisy is a good patient.
“She never whines or complains,” Katie says. “I think I had more trauma after this incident than she did.”
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