Rolling Dog Farm Blog

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?)

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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.

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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."

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Since I had to take Snowball into the vet clinic yesterday, I decided to take little Creighton with me so our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, could look at his eyes.  I had planned to take him to see Brenda on Thursday, but she was kind enough to fit us in between her other appointments.  Having a bouncy, happy puppy on my hands helped me cope with losing Snowball yesterday … trying to keep a blind 4-month old under control kind of keeps you focused on something besides heartache, if you know what I mean.

Brenda was as amazed at Creighton’s eyes as we were.  Because of the bulging appearance, she first measured his intraocular pressures, or IOP, to test for glaucoma.  That’s what she’s doing in the photo above, and vet tech Heather A. is holding our boy.  Yet she got low to normal readings, similar to what I had seen when I measured his eye pressures Friday evening.  That, of course, seems contradictory, given how his eyes look and how painful they are. 

Brenda surmised that the drainage angles in his eyes may have been closed off from birth because of a genetic defect, so he was born with glaucoma.  The fluid in the eye would have continued to build up and up and up, causing the pressures to skyrocket.  Brenda said she could only imagine how much pain he had been in.  She thinks that we’re seeing low pressures now because the resulting damage throughout his eyes may have finally caused the fluid production to shut down altogether.  So even though the pressures are low, the eyes remain buphthlamic (fancy medical term for "bulging") because they have been stretched out from the elevated pressures, and it takes time for the eyes to start shrinking back down.

In this next photo, Brenda is using the slit lamp to look inside his eyes:

What she found is that the iris has adhered to the cornea in both of his eyes.  This is a problem because we had hoped to "save" his eyes by putting the prosthetics in, like we had with Briggs the blind Beagle.  To do that, Brenda needs to take the contents of the inner eye out, then put the prosthesis (a silicone ball) inside the globe, and leave the cornea in place to hold the prosthesis in.  But if the cornea is attached to the iris and thus perhaps to other structures, she may not be able to do that.  Brenda was going to ultrasound his eyes today to see if she could get a better read on this, and I haven’t heard yet what else she found.

If we can’t do the prosthetic implants, then we’ll have to remove his eyes.  But either way, we will finally be able to give him relief from the pain … and that’s the only thing that will matter to him.  His surgery is scheduled for Thursday, so I left Creighton at the clinic yesterday.

Here’s another photo I took of him in the exam room … what a cutie, huh?

And finally, Brenda thought we should have a close-up of the Tono-Pen:

This time he was ready.

Back in mid-January, I had posted about our chronically ill deaf cat Snowball and how we had almost decided to euthanize him because of his worsening condition.  But my hunch then was that there might be something else going on with him, and I asked our vets to run whatever tests they needed to rule out any other possible cause of his latest downhill spiral.  It turned out he had developed a serious heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.  With appropriate heart medications, he turned the corner, began eating again and feeling so much better.

Then, a few weeks ago, he started deteriorating again.  This time we learned that the medication for his oral disease — the stomatitis — had caused stomach ulcers.  But more alarming, new blood tests showed that Snowball’s kidneys were beginning to fail, and that put us in a Catch-22.  He needed fluid therapy for his kidneys, but because of his congestive heart failure, he was on Lasix to prevent fluid retention … so more fluids would only make matters worse.   For the past two weeks, Snowball had been in the hospital while our vets, Brenda and Britt Culver, tried to find the right therapeutic balance to treat all of his conditions.  But his kidney values continued to get worse, and he wasn’t eating enough to sustain himself, so his weight kept dropping.  By last Friday it was apparent there wasn’t much more they could do for him.  Alayne brought him home Friday evening so he could spend his last few days with us. 

I continued to give him his medications every day, but the last time he wanted to eat anything was Sunday morning.  We put out fresh food twice a day, loved him up, but he wouldn’t eat.  This morning when I went in to medicate him and try to interest him in breakfast, I noticed he was having difficulty breathing once more.  This meant the fluid was building up in his chest again.  Snowball was curled up in his round fleece bed, sleeping, and I watched his sides rise and fall with every labored breath.  He finally raised his head up and looked at me, and I could tell it was time.  And I knew he was ready.  He had struggled enough.

I called the clinic to let them know I was bringing Snowball in, and then Alayne came out with me to the cottage for one last visit.  We had a good cry in there while I cuddled Snowball, and Alayne took this final photo of me with our sweet deaf boy.  He was the gentlest, most mellow cat I have ever known.

I drove over to our vet clinic in Helena, and Dr. Jennifer Rockwell was waiting for us.  I held Snowball while Jennifer inserted the catheter in his vein.  He was sitting up on a blanket on the exam table, perfectly still, as the drug entered his bony little body.  After a few seconds, I realized he was limp, and I gently laid him over on his side while Jennifer finished injecting the rest of the euthanasia solution.  I looked down at my watch, and it was 12:44  p.m.  He was gone.

We love you, Snowball.  You sweet, sweet boy.

The snow notwithstanding, there is one sure sign of spring at the ranch — our blind mares are in heat.  None more obviously in heat than Guadalupe, who has spent the past few days flaunting her wares with the neighboring geldings.  (Non-horse people:  That means they’re neutered.  No stallions here!)  Guadalupe’s main guy is blind Bo, who she shares a corral with, but she is much more interested in the boys next door, blind Rocky and his buddy, blind Hawk.  (Sound like anyone you used to date?)

Bo, fortunately, is not the possessive or jealous type, so he just kind of hangs around while she shamelessly flirts with Rocky and Hawk.  And sometimes, as you’ll see, he hangs his head over Guadalupe in mid-flirt, as if to claim her as his own … or maybe to remind her that, ahem, he’s actually still here!  Bo is the equine version of the proverbial door-mat spouse, the endlessly forgiving type.

In the photo at top, Rocky is cooing at her and Guadalupe is pawing the ground in anticipation of the candle-lit dinner to come.

But then big handsome Hawk comes up from behind and elbows Rocky aside, presenting a new romantic opportunity for a hot-blooded girl … and leaving a dejected (rejected?) Bo to hang his head over her:

Please notice Guadalupe’s tail up in the air.  There’s nothing coy about this.  The fact that none of these blind boys can see her tail in the air doesn’t matter one bit.  Obviously.

And then Guadalupe hears Rocky come back over to the fence, so she ditches Hawk momentarily to resume making out with Rocky:

Meanwhile, poor Bo — never one to give up — tries the "maybe she’ll realize I’m here if I hang my head over her back" thing again:

And finally, here’s what she loves the most … being right in the center of all three adoring males:

Spring is in the air.  And love.  If you can call it that.

Here’s the little guy we flew in from Mississippi on Thursday … blind Creighton, a chocolate Lab puppy only four months old.  He’s actually a pretty big and lanky boy for his age, but he still has those tiny, sharp baby teeth and is 100% pure puppy.  He is as sweet as he looks, too — he’s absolutely adorable.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a lady named Debbie L. who runs a poodle and small breed rescue group in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  Debbie’s e-mail had only one line in it.  She wrote, "Please can you take this 4 month old puppy?"  She was forwarding an email from another lady named Lindsey D. in Vicksburg, and attached were photos of the puppy with a horrendous set of bulging, bloodshot, ulcerated eyes. 

The story was simple but sad:  A woman said her daughter had bought the AKC-registered puppy for her boyfriend, but didn’t know the dog was blind.  Daughter and boyfriend broke up, and boyfriend didn’t want the puppy.  Neither did the daughter.  Thus the woman ended up with her daughter’s "gift" and didn’t want him either.  A vet who knew Lindsey had a blind Pug put the woman in touch with her.

Lindsey wasn’t involved in rescue but knew Debbie, so she contacted Debbie for help in finding a home for the blind puppy.  Hence the email to us.

We took one look at those eyes and thought, oh dear — this puppy needs medical care in the worst way.  I had never seen a dog that young with eyes that looked that bad.

We agreed to take him, and began working with Lindsey on the logistics to get him to Montana.  First, we arranged to get the puppy to a vet clinic in Vicksburg and boarded him there to keep him safe until we could fly him out.  We sent Lindsey the money for a crate, and paid for Creighton’s vet exam and other care at the clinic.  I made the flight arrangements with Northwest Airlines to fly him from Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis on Wednesday, where he would overnight at a boarding kennel, and then fly on to Great Falls on Thursday.  So on Wednesday, Lindsey left work early to pick up Creighton at the clinic and drive him to the airport in Jackson to start his journey to Montana.

Here’s a photo I took of Creighton in his crate outside the Great Falls airport:

This is what the sign on the crate said:

At first I couldn’t get Creighton out of the crate, so I finally reached in, picked him up and pulled him out.  Once Creighton realized he was outside, he suddenly became very excited and bouncy .. and then immediately peed all over my shoes.  This was the first of many submissive urinations we’ve seen over the past few days, in fact.  Even though he’s excited to be petted and get attention, the moment he realizes we’re approaching him, he starts piddling.  Once we start petting him, he stops … but something about being approached triggers it.

Yet he’s not at all a fearful, cringing puppy.  Quite the opposite.  He’s happy and cheerful and jumps up and down to greet us, sometimes spinning in a complete 360-degree circle!  Being a puppy, he veers from too-much energy to sound-asleep in five minutes.  Creighton is sleeping on a bed here in my office as I write this, lying next to Ellie May.

He’s clearly a puppy that has had no training or manners taught by either people or other dogs, so his elders in the house are teaching him boundaries and what’s acceptable play.  The Dachshunds, of course, are teaching him to "@#%&! watch where you put your big feet, you lug!"  Even Ellie May told him to mind his manners this afternoon, sounding like a gentle but firm headmistress with a wayward student.

And oh, do those eyes hurt.  When he walks into something, he yikes.  They definitely look like multiple things have gone wrong, but all I can tell is they’re painful.  He has untreated old ulcers on each cornea, but they can’t explain his blindness by themselves.  His eyes bulge like he has glaucoma, but when I took his eye pressures on Friday, I got extremely low readings — either the Tono-Pen is off, my technique is off, or there is something very weird going on inside those eyes.  I’m taking him to see our vet, Brenda Culver, this week.

But bless his little heart, he is such a sweet, happy boy.  Creighton wanders around the house with his big eyes, slapping his paws on the floor with that exaggerated gait we often see in young, blind animals.  He thrives on all the attention he’s getting and on all the activity in the house.  Here’s a close-up of this handsome youngster … click on this photo to get a larger image and you’ll see more of the damage to his eyes:

And here’s another view that will give you a better idea of how his eyes bulge out:

The cost of Creighton’s trip, including the overnight boarding fee, was
$391.63.  The bill for his stay at the vet clinic in Vicksburg was
$232.50.  And he is worth every penny.
Thanks to Lindsey and Debbie in Mississippi for working so hard to save this little guy … and thanks to all of the sanctuary’s generous supporters, whose gifts make it possible for us to take in animals like Creighton.  We couldn’t do this without you.   

When I dropped off our spring newsletters at the Ovando Post Office last Wednesday, our postmaster joked that we should call this edition the "extended winter" issue.  As you’ll see from these photos I took today, there’s a reason!  We’ve had a couple more snowstorms blow through in the past few days, adding a few more inches to the existing snowdrifts scattered around the ranch.  It’s hard to believe it really is springtime. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, we are actually delighted with the snowpack because of the drought-like conditions Montana has had over the past several years.  The longer the snow sticks around, the better it is for the pastures, for the aquifer, for irrigation, for fish in the rivers, and for fire suppression.  But mentally, we are really ready to see bare ground again … especially when it seems like everyone else within 10 miles of here actually does have bare ground!

So for a blog bonus feature, I thought I’d take you on a brief tour of the ranch snowdrifts today.  Some of these are rather amazing snow sculptures.  The photo at the top is outside our front door on the west side of the house. 

Here’s the drift outside the wood shed:

This is the view down the lane towards the sighted horse corral.  We’re going to fire up the snowblower on the tractor this afternoon and try to bust this thing open:

And here is blind Bridger, munching on breakfast … you can see how tall that drift is on the west side of his shed, at least four feet deep:

In this next shot you’re looking at the west side of Widget’s House.  That’s blind Cedar standing on top of the drift on the other side of the fence back there, with blind Patti down below.  Fortunately Cedar doesn’t realize that he could just step over the fence and walk on out to the front yard:

Finally, here’s a close-up of the same drift.  The tracks across the top belong to either Zephyr, Gloria’s dog, or deaf Tyler, both of whom are able to see that they can just walk across the fences!

I drove Mitch the blind Husky to Helena today to see our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, for an eye exam.  I had suspected, based on the appearance of his eyes, that he had progressive retinal atrophy, or PRA.  Brenda and I both like making educated guesses prior to the exam, simply based on visual appearance, and then letting her diagnostic tools tell us how accurate we are. 

In the photo above, Brenda is using her slit lamp to look into his eye.  Vet tech Jayme J. is holding Mitch still for the exam.  The slit lamp is an ophthalmic microscope, so you can see virtually everything going on inside the eye.  After just a few seconds, Brenda turned to me and said, "He’s got the most advanced case of PRA I think I’ve ever seen."  The retinas were as thin as they could possibly be.

In this photo, Brenda is now using a magnifying lens for a different view of his retina:

Next came the intraocular pressure, or IOP, readings with the Tono-Pen, which would indicate whether he has any incipient glaucoma developing.  But his pressures were perfectly normal in both eyes:

So the result is that we’ve confirmed he has PRA and there isn’t, unfortunately, anything we can do to restore vision.  But he is one happy boy, as you can see in this next photo that I took of Mitch in the truck just before we left the ranch this morning … he was pawing at me, trying to get me to put the camera down and love him up instead:

So I left Mitch at the clinic to be neutered, and then drove north out of Helena towards Great Falls.  I was headed to the airport there to meet a little blind guy we were flying in from Mississippi today … a 4-month old Lab puppy named Creighton.  He arrived safe and sound, but I’m going to save him for my Sunday night blog post!

Well, okay then … before I get too much grief, here’s a hint of what this boy looks like (and jeez, look at those eyes):

Stay tuned for Creighton’s story and more photos!

Finally, here’s what our county road looked like when Creighton and I were driving home this afternoon … the ranch is out there somewhere, about a mile away:

Mississippi it ain’t.

I walked out of my office late this afternoon and saw this scene in the living room … blind Briggs parked in front of the TV, looking as if he were using his cone to get better satellite reception with CNN.  And there are the other two Beagles, deaf Stuart on the chair and blind Widget on the cot.  Not one of them was actually paying any attention to Wolf Blitzer’s program.  They may be hounds but they are definitely not, um, newshounds.

Briggs continues to recover from his eye surgery, and his eyes still look pretty icky at this point.  That cone has to stay on for quite a while.

We were surprised to find another side of Briggs last week, after blind Mitch the Husky arrived.  Mitch hasn’t been neutered yet (off to the vet tomorrow!), and Briggs was only recently neutered when he came a few weeks ago, so we’re having a clash of the testosterones … but it’s all coming from Briggs, who obviously still has some of that stuff in his system! 

The first time Briggs realized Mitch was out in the yard, he got his hackles up, started barking, and went wobbling over to let Mitch know that he, Briggs, was the new sheriff in town.  Briggs got so wound up over Mitch that his eyes started bulging  … and I mean bulging so much we thought they were going to pop right out of his head!  We said to him, "Careful, dude, we paid for those eyes!"

Now, bear in mind Mitch towers over this little blind Beagle, but Briggs was going to let him know just who was running the show around here.  This was the strangest thing, because we had never seen Briggs like this before with any of our dogs.  Now suddenly he was Mr. Tough Guy, laying down the law to the new Husky.  Briggs will wobble forth to go nose-to-nose with Mitch, who looks down at this unsteady yet oddly assertive Beagle with the cone on his head and wonders how he should respond. 

Mitch is too sweet to get worked up over something like this, so he finally gives Briggs a dismissive look that says "What on earth are you?" and turns away.  Of course, Briggs interprets this as a "win."

A little testosterone goes a long way.

Here’s Duchess, the little blind-and-deaf girl who arrived three weeks ago.  Because she’s ancient, we’ve started calling her Granny, and it fits her personality.  She’s just the sweetest thing, and every time we pick her up, she licks us on the face.  But honestly, we didn’t really know how she would adapt to this environment, going from living isolated in a garage for most of her life to a high-energy household full of dogs and constant activity.  That can be a difficult adjustment for any old dog, but when you consider she is totally blind and deaf, and never lived with other dogs, we had to wonder what it would be like for her.

In a phrase: piece of cake. 

Actually, I should say:  piece of bread, because that is her favorite thing in the world.  We’ve discovered that she goes crazy whenever she smells bread in the kitchen, and let me tell you, she knows when there’s bread out.  She can smell it from anywhere.  She becomes restless and paces back and forth on the kitchen floor, her head up, nose twitching and her eyes shining, searching for the bread!  So whether it’s toast for our breakfast or bread for sandwiches at lunch, Granny always has to get her slice first or there won’t be peace in the kitchen.  A piece of bread for peace in the kitchen, you might say.

Nothing has fazed her so far, and she has managed to become a "regular" in the household pack.  We watch her mill around with the other dogs — aside from the the Dachshunds she’s the smallest one in the house — and she holds her own.  We worried that she might be a little snappish, just because she’s old and tiny and wouldn’t want to get stepped on … especially when she can’t see or hear anyone coming … but she’s never been that way with the other dogs.  (Attention, Dachshunds:  Please model this behavior!)

So having just told you about Granny’s obsession with bread, I felt a little sheepish after putting her on the couch for the photo shoot today about noon.  Usually when I put her on the couch or a bed, she’ll settle down and nap, but she kept trying to get off the couch, first going one way and then the other, looking for a way down.  She was in constant motion, restless, and increasingly frustrated by being up there.  I said to Alayne, "Jeez, she seems pretty worked up for some reason."

And then — hello, Steve! — I realized why:  Alayne was, yes, in the kitchen making sandwiches, and Granny could smell that bread!  So she must have felt like I was tormenting her by making her sit on that confounded couch for some silly photos while her slice of bread was waiting in the kitchen!

This was the final photo in the series, with Granny’s "okay, I’ve really had enough of this, mister!" look:

I got this photo of Trooper yesterday afternoon on the porch at Widget’s House, while I was over there taking photos of Emmy Lou and Zephyr.  We kept getting requests for updates on this boy, and I’ve been delinquent in posting something … so here he is!

Notice it looks like nature took a perfectly good Labrador body (well, um, figuratively speaking on that "perfectly good" bit) and parked a hound dog head on it.  Love those ears!  Would you call him a "Labound"?  Or maybe a "Houndador?"

Trooper’s right hip has healed just fine from the femoral head ostectomy surgery he underwent last month.  You can see a slight scar from the staples they used to close the incision site.  He continues to hold that leg up a tad, just like he is in the photo, because I think he was so conditioned to not being able to use the leg that he hasn’t re-learned how to use it again.  So when he runs — and let me assure you, he loves to run across the yard at an incredible clip — he just pulls it up off the ground and flies across on three legs.

It is incredibly difficult to photograph or videotape a dark dog on white snow, especially in motion, but once the snow melts, I’ll videotape him in action running so you can see how fast he is. 

His twisted front leg, despite it’s odd shape, doesn’t seem to bother him one bit, and so we are comfortable right now not pursuing the much more complicated and extensive surgery on that leg.

Trooper always looks serious for the camera, but he is a clown at heart … yet when the camera comes out, this goofball from Louisiana adopts this rather dour look.  In reality he is a funny character, springy and bouncy and very vocal.  His crate was on the east side in Widget’s House, which allowed him to see the kitchen area — so whenever any of us were there fixing up food or medications, he would stare at us and bay and bay from his crate.  Having had enough of the crooning coonhound, last week Gloria switched his crate to the west side so he couldn’t see the kitchen area … and the baying stopped.  Out of sight, out of bay.