Dangerous Creatures

Last Thursday night I took the dog for a walk on the beach. It was getting late, and I had already driven up to the dump to get some pics of the bears with my new camera. But when I returned, Mackey was jumping around at the door, which is her way of asking to go out for a walk. So I took her down to the beach.

It was an uneventful walk, as far as I could tell. But when I got her back to the house, Nicole noticed something.

“Mackey has a splinter in her tongue!”

Mackey was sitting on the floor, looking up at us. Her tail was wagging and her tongue was hanging out. Sure enough, I could see a bi-colored splinter stuck in her lolling tongue.

“That’s not a splinter. That’s a porcupine quill.”

She was still looking up at us, apparently unaware that she had a huge spike in her tongue. I coaxed her onto the coach,. Then I tried to pry open her mouth and grab the quill. Her happy demeanor was quickly replaced by the scrunched up face of a resisting little child. As soon as I stopped she would resume panting and tail-wagging, her tongue hanging out as if to show off the quill.

The quill looked smaller than most I had seen. It didn’t seem to be in her tongue too deep, and she did not appear to be in pain. Yet I was beginning to worry. I had heard that quills slowly work their way into the skin. I had also heard that they have barbs like fishhooks that make them difficult to remove Throughout this whole ordeal, Nicole was very helpful. She mostly held Mackey’s head still and said things like, “Just grab it! Just yank it out!” Of course dog drool isn’t exactly sticky. It has what you might call lubricating properties. Any time I did manage to grab the quill, it slipped out of my fingers.

At this point, I did what any college educated person is bound to do when action isn’t working. I switched to research. A quick Google search of “porcupine quill in dog mouth” brought up all sorts of helpful links. They all showed disturbing pictures of dogs covered in quills and said things like:

“A few porcupine quills in a dogs face can usually be removed by the owner, but quills in the mouth will probably require a trip to the vet so that the dog can be sedated.”

I got up form the computer in disgust. A trip to the vet would probably cost us at least five hundred dollars. We would have to borrow a kennel, make arrangements to get her on the plane, make arrangements to pick her up. All because the damn dog had decided to see how a porcupine tastes.. I felt like an American parent who has learned their child has done something stupid and will need an expensive trip to the hospital.

The problem, I decided, was that Mac kept pulling her tongue into her mouth whenever I tried to grab the quill. If only there was some way to make her stick her tongue out.

I went to the cupboard and grabbed the extra large jar of peanut butter we had mailed to ourselves last year. I spooned some into a bowl, and then jammed my fingers into the mess.

“Here Mackey!”

Now instead of pulling her head away, her little tongue was darting in and out like a piston. This didn’t make grabbing the quill any easier. Neither did the great globs of peanut butter stuck to my fingers. At eleven o’clock, we gave up and went to bed.

In the morning, the quill was still there. Because she didn’t appear to be in any pain, we decided that there was no rush. Nicole made plans to call the vet for advice. We thought that maybe they could send up a mild sedative that would allow us to get the quill out.

As we were getting ready for work, Mac came in the bedroom and jumped up on the bed. She was lying on her back with her mouth open. Nicole and I looked at each other, and within seconds, she had grabbed the dog and I had grabbed the quill. It came out very easily, and Mac didn’t even flinch.