We took blind Nikki for her first trailer ride on Friday.  Nikki’s trainer, Nichole Zupan, and I loaded her up, along with Nikki’s Aunt Lena, and took them for a short drive.  Then we practiced unloading, and like everything else she does, Nikki handled it with aplomb.  Before I took this photo of Nikki with…

Tonight as I was walking from the kitchen to my office, I looked over and saw blind Widget in the living room, sound asleep on a pillow.  Widget is a world-class sleeper and regularly books about 18 hours or more of shut-eye a day; during the few hours she’s awake Widget is very active and…

One of our regular blog readers, Cathy, asked in a recent comment to see some of our feline residents on the blog.  With that in mind, I went out to the cat house this evening and took this photo of deaf Snowball.  He had been lying on the fleece bed by the window, and when…

Alayne and Beth are leaving tomorrow for Spokane, Washington, where we’ll be participating in the annual Pet Fest at the Spokane County fairgrounds this weekend.  Pet Fest is a "companion animal trade show and pet adoption extravaganza," and this year the organizers are expecting about 5,000 visitors. We have more disabled animals from Spokane than…

Beth took this wonderful photo of Buzz running through the dog paddock in front of Widget’s House.  He is such an incredibly happy boy, despite his neurological challenges.  Now that it’s springtime, he is out cruising the paddock all day long — it’s a rare thing to see him lying down or even standing still. …

Little Sammy spent the entire Memorial Day weekend in the hospital because of a setback with his diabetes. Early on Friday morning he started another round of obsessive/ compulsive drinking, and then suddenly his back legs began going out from underneath him and he became very wobbly.  He tried to be his normal self and…

Today we tackled a major spring cleaning at Widget’s House, our main building for the disabled dogs.  We have two volunteers, Lisa S. and Christina O., who drove up from L.A. for a few days at the ranch.  They worked with Kathryn all day on this project.  The biggest part of the job was scrubbing…

We always love getting updates about the animals we’ve adopted out, and we were thrilled to receive an email from Heather H. with a report on blind Cookie.  Heather adopted Cookie from us in May 2005 and took her home to the Seattle area, where Heather was in the Navy.  Cookie was a shy, soft,…

The Helena Independent Record newspaper carried a prominent story in today’s edition on blind Stoney coming to the ranch.  The reporter and photographer went to the Lewis & Clark Humane Society to see Stoney on Friday morning, before Leanne brought her out to us.  The reporter interviewed Alayne yesterday for the story. You can read…

Here’s little Wilbur, who arrived at the ranch late yesterday evening.  He came to us from a rescue group in Salt Lake City.  Our awesome volunteer, Jerry Black, drove down to Idaho to pick Wilbur up for us.  Jerry met Kim J. from the rescue group in Dubois, Idaho, which we reckoned was about halfway…