Porcupines...

[Mycookoonest]

I have a Golden Retriever pup and she is into everything. She's a year old but into everything! Is there anything I can do to keep her away from a porcupine we discovered in our area...
How did we discover this creature you might ask... Bella gained some wiskers while we were at work, and gave us a $400 vet bill later to have between 60-100 quills removed...

 

[mmajw]

Get rid of the porcupine......

 

[Miltonchix]

Your dog probably won't go anywhere near the porcupine now. She may be dumb. But certainly NOT stupid!

 

[bills]

Poor puppy, I bet that hurt!

I would do away with the nuisance ASAP. Not only can they be a problem with your pup, but they can chew the heck out of things around the farm as well....

 

[amazondoc]

Ummmm.....how about keeping the dog safely in a fence or inside when you're gone, rather than letting her run loose??

 

[Chirpy]

I just wrote a thread about this same stinkin issue a couple days ago. Our one year old pup has tangled with a porcupine twice in the last month. Thankfully she didn't get more than 15 or so quills in her muzzle and we were able to pull the out ourselves.

Our two older dogs tangled with a porcupine a couple years ago and they had to go to the vet to get the hundreds of quills removed. Our vet bill was only $100 per dog ... that was awful, I'd have choked at $400!!!

Miltonchix -- you'd think they would learn.... most don't. According to my two vets out here ... almost all the dogs they see with porcupine quills are repeat offenders. Most of the dogs come back again and again to have quills removed from the vet!!

The only way that I know of to stop this behavior is to put up a fence to keep the dogs in and the porcupines out of your property. I'd certainly love to hear from anyone that's found another solution as I need it too.

amazondoc: I just wanted to edit this to respond to your good idea... our dogs are our livestock protectors. They have free run of our 40 acres to protect our other animals from coyotes, raccoons, etc. If they are locked up in a kennel - they can't do their job. Thankfully with our dogs running loose (on our property) we've never lost a chicken or other animal to a predator. A few years ago we did lock up our dogs at night and lost several cats to predators in a week's time! I won't lock them up again.

 

[amazondoc]

Quote:
Yeah, livestock guardian dogs are a different issue than a golden retriever.

 

[dacjohns]

Get a fisher.

 

[Mycookoonest]

Quote:
Yeah, livestock guardian dogs are a different issue than a golden retriever.

Our dogs have the invisible fence... so we do not see the necessity of fencing her in since she's trained to stay in the yard. And she is in a kennel at night.

We haven't seen the Porc, and it was daylight when we left the house and daylight when we returned. On 1/2 an acre of property on a cudasac... we have never seen one on our street.

What are the odds of it returning? I saw a pile of what looked like cat feces by my car and I'm thinking that's where the "incident took place".

 

[Chirpy]

Mycookoonest wrote:

Our dogs have the invisible fence... so we do not see the necessity of fencing her in since she's trained to stay in the yard. And she is in a kennel at night.

Ya, that seems to be the issue. Our dogs don't leave the property, the porcupines come onto our property. That makes it much harder to stop. I guess we could catch the porcupine and put a radio collar on it to keep it outside the fence!