This baby girl arrived last night at the ranch from the Yolo County SPCA in Davis, California.  The shelter had asked us earlier last week if we could take a blind 10-week puppy who had been dumped in their overnight bin.  Jerry Black, our incredible volunteer who drove to Bozeman on Thursday to pick up…

At first glance the title of this post looks like we’re branching out from dogs, cats and horses … but we’re not.  Turtle and Mink are two disabled cats who just arrived from the Humane Society of Gallatin Valley in Bozeman, Montana.  Turtle is a blind tortie who is already quite adept at finding her…

One of the many beautiful things about where we live is the sheer number of rainbows we get to enjoy seeing.  Our valley is officially named ‘Kleinschmidt Flat,’ after the earliest settlers in the 1800’s, but Alayne and I have often thought it should be renamed ‘Rainbow Flat.’  For some reason — we’re not sure…

You may remember reading about two cats named Bonnie and Clyde who arrived here on October 9th from Austin, Texas.  We had agreed to take them because we’d been told the cats were ‘disabled’ and had cerebellar hypoplasia, making them wobbly and unbalanced on their feet. Well, after a couple of days lurking in a…

Alayne took two calls in the last 24 hours from people whose horses had gone blind, and their vets had told them they should just put the animals down.  Both individuals actually wanted to keep their blind horses, and had called us seeking more information on how to care for them. This, unfortunately, we see…

Who ever came up with the saying, ‘working like a dog?’  Really, do you think they had a dog?  The only thing our guys work hard at is sleeping.  Alayne fixed up a new bed last weekend … actually a couple of West Paw beds piled on top of a Kuranda dog cot, topped with…

This is a scene that happens often around the house.  Burrowed deep in a pile of dog bedding on the favorite ‘sleeping chair’ is Oscar the elderly miniature Dachshund.  Looming over him is Widget, our blind Beagle/Dachshund mix.  She is determined to sleep in that chair.  So her chair-stealing strategy is to climb up the…

We just learned yesterday afternoon that a kind person donated $200 worth of advertising for the sanctuary on an innovative Web site called New West.  The site is "devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West."  If you want to know what’s going on across the Rockies, this…

Bonnie and Clyde, a brother and sister pair of cats, arrived at the ranch last night.  Jerry Black, our awesome volunteer who serves as ‘animal chauffeur,’ picked them up at the Missoula airport and brought them out to the ranch. These cats have cerebellar hypoplasia, a neurological condition that affects their fine motor skills and…

We got up this morning and found that Allie, our wobbly puppy with cerebellar hypoplasia, had managed overnight to chew open her spay sutures.  We had just brought her and the other recently spayed girls back from the clinic yesterday afternoon.  Not only did she have a wide-open slit into her abdomen, but it had…