[Saw this pup on TV--all those quills! Ouch!]

By Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff, 11/12/2002

It took three fire departments, two animal control officers, dozens of volunteers, and 36 hours to rescue a 55-pound beagle that lost a scrap with a porcupine and got stuck in a drainpipe in Rutland.

Woodsie, a pudgy pooch, was chasing a porcupine Sunday morning in Rutland State Park when he followed it into a 90-foot-long drainage pipe. He scampered over a mound of dirt halfway in, and found himself face to face with the porcupine's entire family.

With the dirt behind him and a half-dozen angry animals in front of him, Woodsie couldn't move. The frantic owner, Jack O'Connor, was not able to follow the dog into a 14-inch-wide culvert, so he called police. They called the fire department, which summoned animal control officers, and the gathering around Woodsie's trap mushroomed.

By midday yesterday, O'Connor, a parole officer, said firetrucks and police cars had been staged at the rescue scene for hours along with television crews chronicling the event. Firefighters shot water into the culvert in the hopes of shoving the dirt through, but the mound didn't budge. So volunteers and firefighters duct-taped shovels together length-wise to scoop out the dirt.

Finally, Angela Coates, the 110-pound animal control officer from neighboring Oakham, tied a rope to her ankles and crawled face first into the pipe. One handful of dirt at a time, she and several of the smaller volunteers dug out the blockage, said Richard Clark, the Rutland animal control officer.

By 9 last night, after Woodsie's path was cleared and he had scooted toward Coates with 35 porcupine quills stuck in his muzzle, rescuers pulled the pair out.

O'Connor was thrilled: ''I'll tell you this, it's a different take on humanity than I'm used to seeing at work.''

-- Anonymous, November 12, 2002