Poor Miss Dots...

Miss Dots apparently tried to make friends with a porcupine sometime today.  It appears the porcupine was not as friendly as she would have liked.

It took me about 20 minutes of wrestling with her to pull them out with my fingers.  I'm thinking it was likely this was a juvenile porcupine.  The quills were all short, about an inch and a half to two inches long.  Only a few were difficult to pull out.  A couple were near her eye, but I didn't see any eye issues.  I'll watch for swelling over the next couple of days in case of infection.

Thank goodness I've watched shearers sit sheep on their butts; that was the only way for me to control her enough to get all of the quills out.  Thank goodness as well that she is a small sheep!  (She's a Shetland, and just a yearling.)  I don't know how I would have handled a very big sheep!  This is certainly something that has never happened in the over-20 years that we've lived here!