Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I thought you’d like to know that our beloved old mule, Roy, is doing much better after losing his buddy, blind Scout.  We have continued to let him wander the ranch at will, which suits him just fine.  People who have come to the ranch in the past week are often startled to see this big-eared guy walking around freely.  They turn to us and ask, "Say, do you know you have a mule loose?"

Why, yes we do.

Roy has started attaching himself to us, and whenever we’re around Beauty’s Barn, he quietly ambles over and walks up to us until his massive head is just an inch or so from our chest.  That’s the signal for, "Go ahead.  Scratch me."  There’s nothing he likes more than to have those ears scratched, which is what I’m doing in the photo at the top that Alayne took this morning. 

So his routine now is to hang out inside the south end of Beauty’s Barn, in the barn aisle right outside his and Scout’s stalls, and use that as his base to explore.  Roy visits blind Hannah and Luna in their corral, and he stands next to old Crazy Horse and little Brynn when we put them up in their stalls for the night.  He’s even taken to coming down to the welcome center in the evenings.  Roy has visited the sighted horse herd again, though I suspect it’s as much to rub their horsey noses in the fact that he, a mule, is free to wander and they are not.  Hee-haw.

He’s the original smorgasbord-eater, preferring to sample a little of this and a little of that.  This preference for nibbling has always made it difficult to keep weight on the old guy, although our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, says that for an ancient mule he’s in good body condition — despite some bony ribs.  But his new set-up is perfect for his eating style.

Roy’s got a stack of alfalfa hay flakes at the north end of the barn, bales of grass hay at the south end, and green grass wherever he goes.  Though true to his smorgasbord nature, he’ll still eat the hay in addition to grazing the grass — unlike other equines, who wouldn’t touch the hay if they could have green grass.  Our biggest nutritional challenge has always been to get him to eat his equine senior grain, which he just picks at in small bites before losing interest.  Other equines would wolf it down, but not Roy:  "I’ll just have a sample, thank you."  That’s his style.  But he’ll gladly come over to get a mouthful or two when I dish it up for Crazy Horse.  Just don’t serve him a couple of scoops of the stuff.

His major health problem continues to be his joints.  After he arrived last summer, Erin X-rayed his legs and called him a "walking arthritic nightmare."  Following joint injections, lots of farrier work, and daily anti-inflammatories, he is better than he was … but there is only so much we can do for him.  You can see in that photo above of Roy walking how he is dragging that left rear foot.  He does that with both rear feet.  Like blind Laddie, we continually assess Roy’s quality of life and his physical comfort.

For now, though, Roy seems quite content with his new lifestyle.  I took this photo of him lying down in the grass for a nap this morning:

Barbara Edwards, a quiltmaker from Seeley Lake, Montana, has graciously offered to make another gorgeous quilt for us and raffle it off, with 100% of the proceeds going to the animals at the ranch.  This will be the third quilt raffle Barbara has done for the sanctuary, and this year’s quilt is just stunning.  Barbara and her husband Scott came by today to show us her beautiful handiwork.  I took the photo of Barbara and Scott with Alayne in our welcome center this afternoon.  (Alayne did not miraculously grow another foot in height but is standing on a chair.)

What you see in the photo is only half the quilt … it was too big for us to hold up the entire thing!  The dimensions are 86" x 103".  This year’s quilt is called ‘Bone Appetit’ … for good reason, as you can see.

Here’s a close-up of the quilt detail:

The raffle details are:

— 200 tickets available for $5 each … so $1,000 to benefit the animals!

— Make your check payable to Barbara Edwards

— Please send your check directly to Barbara Edwards, P.O. Box 104, Seeley Lake, Montana, 59868

— Barbara will fill out the raffle ticket stub with the information you send with your check … please make sure she has your full name, address and phone number

— If you want your portion of the ticket(s) mailed back to you, please send Barbara a stamped, self-addressed envelope

— The drawing will be held at the ranch once all 200 tickets are sold and the winner will be announced on the blog as well as notified personally

Note that Alayne and I are not handling the raffle, so please don’t send any money for tickets to the ranch.

There you have it … Bone Appetit!

And thank you, Barbara!

We never know how the day is going to go when we get up every morning, because we never know what we’re going to find.  That’s what happens when you’re caring for more than 80 animals.  Today’s ‘morning surprise’ was finding that our mare Lilah had punctured her right eye overnight.  This wasn’t your typical corneal ulcer, but a deep, penetrating wound that went all the way through the cornea and into her eye.  The internal contents of her eye were leaking out and down her face.  I couldn’t imagine the pain.

Lilah can see but has night blindness, so she’s the spirited boss of the sighted horse herd during the day but a meek little thing at night.  When this trauma happened she was in her corral, which has smooth Priefert panels for fencing, so we have no idea at this point how she did this.   

Ironically, our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, has been in Florida this week attending a special equine ophthalmology program taught by Dr. Dennis Brooks, Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and three other leading equine ophthalmologists.  Thus I called Dr. Angela Langer, Erin’s colleague at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital, when we discovered Lilah’s injury. 

Angela said she would get here as fast as she could, and in the meantime she had me inject some IV banamine in Lilah for pain control.  Angela arrived with Amy P., the fourth-year vet student from Oklahoma State University who had been out here a couple of weeks ago with Erin as part of her ‘externship’ training.  In the photo at top, that’s Angela on the left doing surgery while Amy assists.  This is what Lilah’s eye looked like when we got her in the horse stock:

It actually looked worse than this, but her eyelashes are covering up the actual puncture site.  There was nothing we could do other than take the eye out — it’s called enucleation — so Angela and Amy got Lilah sedated and proceeded to surgery:

This procedure is called a ‘standing enucleation’ because the horse is sedated, rather than put under general anesthesia, to remove the eye.  This eliminates the risks associated with anesthetizing horses.  A landmark study published in last month’s issue of the medical journal Veterinary Surgery evaluated the use of standing enucleations as an alternative to the same surgery under general anesthesia, and concluded:  "These results demonstrate that an eye can be safely and humanely
removed without having to anesthetize the patient, making it a safer,
more economical approach."  (My emphasis.)

And here’s Angela cleaning up Lilah’s face after the surgery:

While we had Lilah sedated we noticed her left eye was undergoing changes, but what exactly was going on we weren’t sure.  When Erin returns, fresh from her ophthalmology training, she can tell us whether Lilah will be joining the ranks of the blind horse herd some day!

I was taking photos for our summer print newsletter yesterday, and one of the animals who will be featured in this next issue is three-legged Honey Girl. She came to us last December from the Spokane County animal control shelter.  She is a complete ham and a show-off, and she will do anything to get attention.  Alayne calls her ‘Pretzel’ because of her ability to twist herself into all kinds of odd shapes. 

She is usually on the perching shelves that line the walls of the cat house, and as soon as we walk in, Honey Girl begins throwing herself upside down or rolling on her back or hanging off the shelf.  In other words, anything to draw attention to herself.  In that photo of her at the top, you see exactly the kind of thing she does.  "Over here!  Look at me!"  In case the visuals aren’t enough, she often chatters with little meows as she goes through her routine.  So while Alayne calls her Pretzel, I call her Showgirl.

This is the kind of look we get when she’s done … sort of a "So, what did you think of that?" expression:

Judging from the number of emails and blog comments we’ve had, it appears I have been rather delinquent in posting an update on the blind Poodle sisters!  They are doing great, and have joined the other disabled dogs over at Widget’s House, our main dog building.  I took the photo above of Alayne with Priscilla (standing) and Molly this afternoon, on a very warm and windy spring day.

Although many people think of Poodles as fancy city dogs, their real history is that of a working dog.  Here’s what Wikipedia’s entry says: "Poodles are retrievers, or gun dogs, and can still be seen in that role. The show clips evolved from working clips, which originally provided warmth to major joints when the dogs were immersed in cold water. The rest of the body is shaved for less drag in the water. Poodles are skilled at most other dog events including agility, obedience, tracking, and even herding."

Here’s another photo I took this afternoon.  That’s Priscilla in front, with Molly lying in the grass behind her and wobbly Allie enjoying the sunshine, too.

Both Molly and Priscilla really seem to enjoy having all that space to run around in … there’s a lot to sniff out there!

It’s almost time to get them to the groomers again, but this is what we will not be doing to them:

These girls are Montana ranch poodles, after all!

Thank you to everyone who has posted or emailed us such wonderful sentiments about Roy and Scout.  We really appreciate it!  I wanted to let you know that Roy is doing better.  Last night, about 8 p.m., Alayne and I looked out the living room window and were startled to see Roy had made his way down to the sighted horse corral.  This is about 100 yards from Beauty’s Barn, and thus the first sign — and a very healthy one — that he was starting to explore again.

I got the camera and walked out to take the photo above of Roy greeting a couple of the sighted horses.  The white horse is Lilah and Blueberry is behind her.  Since Roy arrived last summer, he had only been with Scout and the other blind horses who live at Beauty’s Barn.  So I think he was a bit surprised to notice that, holy smokes, there are some horses at the ranch who can actually see!

We would never put Roy in with our small herd of sighted horses because they would, sad to say, chase him around and pick on him.  And given his rickety and creaky old joints, that’s the last thing he needs.  I think that thought was crossing Roy’s mind just about the time I took the photo, because the greeting lasted only a minute or two and then he wandered through that open gate and made his way back down to Beauty’s Barn.  This morning when I went out to feed, I found him standing in the barn aisle again, outside Scout’s stall.  But we were pleased to see him venture that far afield last night.

I wasn’t going to write about this.  Especially for a start-of-the-week blog post. 

We’ve had too many losses this year, and I know quite a few of our regular readers were getting emotional fatigue in recent months from logging on to the blog and having to reach for the Kleenex box too many times.

But I decided last night this was a story that needed to be told.  It’s not really about the one we lost — our old blind horse Scout — but about the buddy he left behind, our old mule Roy.  I wrote last October how these two senior gentlemen had become the best of friends.

For the past two weeks we’d been battling a severe case of laminitis with Scout.  Laminitis can be caused by any number of "triggers."  Our equine vet and surgeon, Dr. Erin Taylor, had been out here to treat him, and we thought we had turned the corner.  But Saturday morning Scout could barely move.  He was trying to shift as much of his weight from his front hooves to his back hooves, so when he walked, he looked like he was going to fall over backwards.  It was the most awkward thing I’d seen in a horse.  It was painful to watch.

I called Erin, who had me give Scout a large dose of acepromazine and additional anti-inflammatories, and then asked me to bring him in to Missoula and she’d meet me at the clinic.  We X-rayed his front hooves, and as she slid the images onto the lightboard, she said, "This is not good."  I could immediately tell what had happened.  And I knew what it meant.  In both feet the coffin bone — also called the pedal bone or P3, the bottom bone in the leg that sits inside the hoof — had separated from the hoof wall.  In his left foot the coffin bone was pointed almost straight down, and was only a few millimeters from coming through the sole of his foot.  Scout had to be in agony.

I leaned back against the wall, tears welling up.  Erin told me about our options. One was to try and alleviate his pain and discomfort to the extent that was even possible, knowing we were only buying some time.  As Erin put it, "At the cost of what suffering?"  Or we could let him go.  There was nothing we could do to reverse the rotation of the coffin bone.  I called Alayne to tell her what we had found, and we agreed the only humane thing was to let him go.  So Erin and I walked Scout slowly out to a field behind the clinic.  As I put my arms around this old horse’s neck and cried, Erin pulled up fresh green grass with her hands from the field and fed it to Scout.  He munched quietly for several minutes, enjoying every bit of it.

Finally, Erin injected the first syringe of the euthanasia drug into a catheter in his neck, and then I handed her the second syringe.  As she finished injecting the remaining dose, Scout stood there for a few seconds, wobbled back and forth, and then collapsed to the ground.

When I had left the ranch that morning with Scout, we had turned his friend Roy loose, letting him wander at will.  Roy has been eager to get out and graze, and he always loves to explore, so we figured he’d be content to spend the warm, sunny spring day wandering the ranch.  (Roy can see.)  But he never ventured from the area around Beauty’s Barn, where he and Scout lived.

As I drove back in with the horse trailer Saturday afternoon, Alayne — who was at Beauty’s Barn doing chores — told me that Roy watched me drive past the barn and continue on to the house.  He hee-hawed as I went by, thinking Scout was on board and coming back.  Roy was still staring at the trailer as I got out of the truck and walked inside the house.  Thinking that somehow he had missed me unloading Scout, Roy walked into Beauty’s Barn to look for his friend.  But Scout wasn’t there. 

For the rest of the afternoon and evening, Roy stood in the barn aisle, right next to Scout’s stall, waiting.  It broke our hearts to watch him like this.  He would disappear out the south door of the barn, nibble on some grass or the hay stacked outside, then come back in and stand vigil next to the stall.

I put the dogs up at Widget’s House last night at 9 p.m. and walked over to Beauty’s Barn, and I could see Roy’s silhouette in the darkened barn aisle.  He was still there.  I walked into the barn and hugged this old mule.  Judging from the piles of poop in the aisle, I could tell he had rarely left that spot.

That’s when I realized I wanted to tell this story.  Too many people don’t think of equines this way … as sensitive, thinking, emotional animals who form intense bonds with one another.  But they do get attached, and they definitely feel the loss when their buddy disappears.

I walked back down to the house, got the camera, and returned to Beauty’s Barn.  That’s when I took the photo above of Roy looking at Scout’s stall.  He wasn’t too wild about the flash going off, so he went out the south door and then turned around to look back in:

Today, 24 hours after I returned with an empty trailer, Roy still hasn’t ventured more than 20 yards from that barn door.  We’re going to give him a little more time to come to terms with Scout’s death, and then we’ll see who we can pair him up with.  But for now, our hearts ache as much for Roy as for gentle old Scout.   

From the moment he arrived at the ranch a few months ago from Georgia, blind Briggs fancied himself as a ladies’ man.  Nothing gets him more worked up than the nearby presence of a new female dog … and yes, he’s been neutered!  The only thing that comes close to generating that level of excitement is, well, dinner.  (He is a Beagle, after all.)

So whenever new females arrive … whether they’re old (like Lady) or young (like the Poodle sisters, Molly and Priscilla), or something in between (like Sweetie) … he dashes about like mad, trying to introduce himself to them.  He really couldn’t care less how old they are.  (If he were a human, I suspect he’d be the kind of guy who’d take out a personal ad saying, "Seeking: Any female, age 18-80" and wonder why no one replied.) 

In his mind he’s this compact hunk of a guy with a soft, courtly Southern manner.  He can’t imagine why these gals aren’t drawn to him.

Alas, it turns out they aren’t attracted at all to a pint-sized Beagle with bulging, mottled eyes who wobbles out to greet them.  (That until recently he was wearing a lampshade-sized cone on his head didn’t help either.)  The fact that Briggs can’t manage to stand still during the introduction suggests to them he has a drinking problem, though in reality it’s the lingering effects of the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever he contracted in Georgia.  But the end result is rather alarming, and so the girls flee as soon as he shows up.

But Briggs remains undaunted, and he figures that an animal sanctuary with a steady stream of new female residents is the best place for a ladies’ man like him to be anyway.  The right gal will show up one day.  Until then, he satisfies himself with a good roll in the spring sunshine:

When I took blind Austin the Beagle to our vet clinic in Helena yesterday, I also brought along blind Lady, the old girl who came to us about a month ago from Missoula Animal Control.  A week after she arrived, our vets did an echocardiogram and found that Lady had a serious heart problem — mitral valve regurgitation — that had caused pulmonary edema, or fluid building up in her chest.  She also had Cushing’s disease and a major urinary tract infection.  Based on her heart condition, they didn’t think she’d have long to live … a matter of months, most likely. 

We started her on multiple heart medications, antibiotics for the infection, and a British drug for Cushing’s called trilostane, under the brand name Vetoryl.  (It’s not approved for sale in the U.S. yet but the FDA allows veterinarians to order it from the U.K. through a special process.)   

So Lady was due for another echocardiogram and other tests to assess her heart function and see how well she was responding to the medications.  Our vet Dr. Jennifer Rockwell called today with good news from the echo:  While Lady’s left atrium is still enlarged, it has improved, as has her heart’s ‘contractility,’ or pumping ability.  Best of all, there was also no fluid building up in her chest, which was a very good sign and a major improvement. 

Jennifer was cautiously optimistic that given these trends, Lady might be able to live longer than they originally thought when they first saw her.  And that was great to hear!

I took the photo above of Lady a couple of weeks ago after we had her groomed … her thick, shaggy coat was terribly matted underneath, so she needed to be shaved down.  She is mostly deaf, we learned, but if you’re within about 10 feet of her and speak VERY LOUDLY, she can hear you … and then she starts wagging that fluffy tail of hers in a happy greeting!

I took our recent arrival from Atlanta, the blind Beagle puppy Austin, to see our vet Dr. Brenda Culver in Helena this morning.  Austin needed the usual "oil, lube and filter" work — neutering, blood panel, and urinalysis — but the first order of business on any of our blind arrivals is a thorough eye exam.  We want to know what they’re blind from and what else is going on in their eyes, so we can anticipate any future medical needs.  In the photo above Brenda is getting ready to use her slit lamp to examine his eyes while vet tech Jayme J. holds Austin.

I had mentioned in my first post on Austin that his eyes "are clear but appear a little odd … a tad undersized, perhaps, but not what would be considered microphthalmia."  Yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on why they looked odd.  Well, it turns out that his corneas are misshapen, which changes the appearance of the eye ever so slightly.  But Brenda found he’s blind because the optic disc in each eye — where the optic nerve enters the retina, also called the "head" of the optic nerve — is misshapen and too small.  This condition is called ‘optic nerve hypoplasia.’  So that suggests Austin has been centrally blind from birth, even though his retinas looked good and have plenty of blood vessels supplying them.

Using her Tono-Pen, Brenda measured his intraocular pressures as well.  Those pressures were within normal range, so there’s no sign of glaucoma developing.

Here’s Brenda using the slit lamp to look into his right eye:

In this photo Brenda is using her ophthalmoscope and a magnifying lens to get a different view of his retinas:

We won’t have his blood work or other results until tomorrow, but at the moment — besides being blind — he seems like a healthy little tyke.  Austin is still very timid greeting new people … he drops to his belly, tucks his tail and looks very afraid … but after you pet him and coo over him, Austin starts wagging his tail and gets up for more attention.  He has a long way to go before he will ever be as brassy and bold as blind Widget (see previous post), but under her tutelage, I’m sure we’ll have another bossy blind Beagle on our hands some day!