The Old Ladies Club at the Rolling Dog Ranch just added a new member, and her name is … Lady! Ed Franceschina, director of Missoula Animal Control, emailed us on Tuesday and asked if we could take an old, blind Cocker Spaniel mix they had picked up as a stray. They estimated she was about 12. She was found wandering near Reserve Street in Missoula, which is a busy, four-lane road.
No one had come forward to claim her, and the shelter put her up for adoption, including running her photo in the paper. Ed wrote, "She’s sweet and gets around well but she’s pretty old and no one has shown any interest in her." He kept her in his office during the day, and had named her Lady. Ed’s team at Animal Control had taken her to a local vet for a health exam, and despite needing some serious dental work and grooming, Lady is in otherwise good health. (Missoula is blessed to have a wonderful Animal Control department, staffed with truly caring people who go the extra mile for the animals who end up at the shelter.)
Lady is totally blind, I suspect from progressive retinal atrophy. And she is as sweet as Ed said she was.
I took these photos after I got back to the ranch with her this afternoon. At first I had Alayne take some photos of me holding Lady, but then the phone rang so I handed it to Alayne to answer. I put Lady’s leash in Alayne’s other hand, took the camera from her, and started taking photos. As you can see, Lady looks like a Cocker Spaniel/Border Collie mix, perhaps … her legs and feet are polka-dotted with black spots:
And here’s who Lady was attached to … the other lady known affectionately as Mrs. Babushka, wearing her ever-present headscarf and looking like she was doing a little tap-dancing in the mud while talking on the phone:
So next week we’ll take Lady to our vets in Helena for the dental work she needs. When she comes out of her isolation period, she’ll get to meet the other members of the Old Ladies Club, Ellie May and Duchess. (Maybe we should call this the Blind Old Ladies Department, or BOLD for short?)
—
And speaking of vets, Brenda Culver called this afternoon with the report on Creighton the blind Lab puppy. The ultrasound showed he had a lot of free fluid in his eyeballs — Brenda said they could actually see it sloshing around on the ultrasound image. And the ultrasound indicated his retinas were detached, too. When she took Creighton to surgery this afternoon, she found that the fluid was blood … his eyes were filled with it, in both the posterior and anterior chambers. Brenda said the blood had come most likely from the retinas having separated from the back "wall" of the eye. As a result of that damage and the fact that the irises were adhered to the corneas, Brenda could not do the prosthetic implants to save his eyes, so she had to remove them.
Brenda said Creighton came through the surgery just fine and recovered from the anesthesia, and he’ll be ready to come home this weekend.
—
Finally, to follow up a question that some people asked in response to our post about our blind mare Guadalupe being in heat — why don’t we spay the mares? — one of our blog readers posted a perfect answer. So in case you didn’t see it in the comments for that blog post, here’s what Janet wrote:
"Spaying a mare is a hugely invasive, highly risky, and very expensive
operation, especially when compared with gelding a male. It’s a
no-brainer in terms of risk not to spay a mare. It is done on occasion,
but usually not for "neutering" purposes. Highly valuable brood mares
are sometimes operated on. The recovery on a horse after large surgery
is very complicated and fraught with risk."
—
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
Leave a comment