[Daffynition]

499 quills...and it wouldn’t have been newz....but 500 quills brought it to Olympic proportions. :)

Did you ever use the vinegar and baking soda soak to soften them?

http://www.alaska.net/~springer75/quills.htm

[golux]

Sounds like an interesting idea, and the farm is long gone, but we were always well aware that it was better to have a dog's snout that looked a little messed up for a couple of days than to have a dog's snout that had foreign objects embedded in it. I would worry therefore that any agent used to deteriorate the proteins in the quill (or keratin?) would bleed down the inside of the shaft and soften up the stuff that needs to be pulled out. The worst thing would be to pull the quill and have some of it still in there, which never happened to us. Funny thing is, if you do it quick, the dogs seem to understand and forgive you right away. The trick for us was to snip the ends off the quills to let them deflate and - maybe - let the barbs back down a little. It's also possible that the dogs' white blood cells and pus were also attacking those things, lubricating the extraction.


I miss those dogs.