On the weekend, while walking my dog, we were beseiged by the pictured attacker. I'm not quite sure what it is called, but it looked like a small chunk of cactus and the spikes it had were all barbed so that once it was stuck in you, it didn't come out easily.
Honestly, I'm not sure how vindictive a plant has to be in order to develop such a defense mechanism.
This was first noticed when my dog started favoring one of her rear paws. Removal was anything but straightforward. In order to grab it, I had to impale my fingers on the spikes enough to get a good grip and then pull it off of the paw. After the first attempt, my dog was less thrilled with this plan. Instead of sitting patiently while I went to work, she decided to pull away, not wanting me to mess with her sore foot. Still, she did not growl or get too upset with me, so I can't complain.
Of course, once I had it off of the dog, I then had to figure out a way to get it off of me. Like I said, it stuck to anything it touched. I eventually managed to flick it off me somehow, only to notice that my dog had stumbled across another one. Obviously, this was not the best destination for our walk that day.
After removing the second cactus-thing, we took a moment to catch our breath and I snapped a few pictures of the area. I already had the camera out, as my goal was to get some more shots of the dog. You can see them on her blog. Needless to say, we won't be visiting that field any time in the near future.
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