Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This is blind Emmy Lou on the left, about to steal a bone from her boyfriend, able-bodied Zephyr.  Our employee Gloria G., who is Zephyr’s mom, asked if she could adopt Emmy Lou, and we gladly said yes.  Gloria started taking her home on a trial basis, and Emmy Lou adapted so well that we made the adoption official.

Soon after coming to work here last October, Gloria and Zephyr fell in love with Emmy Lou, and the two dogs would play together every chance they had.  Now at the end of the day they both go home with Gloria, and then come back the next day when Gloria returns to work.  When Gloria first began taking her home, Emmy Lou was very nervous about getting in the car — but now she insists on riding up front in the passenger seat!

Here’s the next shot in the sequence of photos I took this afternoon at our dog building, Widget’s House.  Emmy Lou is moving in on Zephyr’s bone:

Then she snatches it and makes a clean grab:

Zephyr is always a good sport about his pushy girlfriend’s behavior (being blind doesn’t mean you can’t get your way), so he simply swaps bones and resumes chewing:

Here’s what they were doing before the bone-heist occurred:

And now, if you’re wondering what Emmy Lou’s new mom looks like, well, Gloria won’t let me take her photo for the blog!  Gloria is leaving at the end of May to return to school in Ohio, so I have a couple of more months to work on her about the photo-shyness thing, but in the meantime, this is as much of her as I can get away with posting:

The Rolling Dog Ranch Chauffeur Service was on the road again this morning, headed to Missoula to pick up blind Penny at Missoula Veterinary Specialty Clinic.  I took the  photo of our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Dave Bostwick, doing a ‘check-out check-up’ on Miss Penny before we left the hospital.  She seems a little suspicious in this photo, and I thought about titling this blog post, "What exactly are you doing back there?"

Penny had come down with full-blown pneumonia, but has recovered quickly.  She will need to stay on a course of antibiotics for a while, but she is a much different girl than she was just two days ago. 

When I got back to the ranch and opened the back door of the truck, Penny almost fell out.  She had fallen asleep right against the door, so when I opened it, her full weight — about 90 pounds — was pressing on it.  I got my hands on her just in time.  She was still sound asleep, and happy to stay that way, too!

We had adopted Penny out last year to a wonderful family in Missoula, but after only one day with them, Penny began acting sick.  She didn’t want to eat, she drank constantly, she paced and was restless, and seemed totally out of sorts.  Her new family called and told us they were worried something was very wrong with her.  So we had them take Penny to Dave, and I asked Dave to give her a thorough medical exam, ultrasound her organs, run blood panels, and do any other diagnostics he thought were in order. 

Two days and a few hundred dollars later, Dave called with the results.  Penny was fine.  A very healthy dog.  There was nothing wrong with her at all.

Except … as it turned out … she was sick … homesick! 

When Penny still didn’t improve, Penny’s adopters finally brought her out to the ranch to return her.  They told us that when they turned off the highway and onto the county gravel road that leads to the ranch, Penny suddenly sat up in the back seat of their car.  Then she started smiling and wagging her tail.  They said that as soon as Penny realized where she was — headed back to the ranch — she sprang to life.  She stood up in the seat the rest of the way, her tail just flipping back and forth with excitement.  When Alayne went out to greet them, Penny bounded over, pressed her body against Alayne’s leg and didn’t let up.  She was so happy to be home.

Penny went right back to being her old self again.

And of course, we felt guilty about having put her through this!

This handsome boy is blind Mitch, a husky who arrived this evening from a rescue group in Indiana.  A wonderful lady named Sharon A. runs Mercy Rescue, along with her husband Max, and she emailed us on March 1 about this dog.  Sharon wrote:

"Mitch was abandoned in an outside kennel at our county animal control facility one cold Saturday night in January.  We always check the kennels on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings because they are closed on the weekends.  When I saw him I was impressed with his sweet disposition and his good looks.  I told my husband, “We have to save this dog.”  We had no idea he was blind. We gave him food and water and I called animal control on Monday morning.  When we went to pick him up, the kennel tech informed us he had a vision problem.  She brought him into the office and we could see that he was probably blind.  We took him to a local vet immediately.  She said he does have cataracts but they are not serious enough to blind him.  She indicated his blindness could have any number of causes, but she was not able to do the diagnostics so Mitch would have to see a specialist, and would probably never see again.  Being a small rescue in a small town the funds are simply not available for specialist care."

Sharon’s note continued:

"It was my opinion that such a pretty dog with such a gentle disposition was adoptable even if he was blind.  I posted pictures of Mitch and the info about him on Petfinder and other sites.  To my dismay we have not received one inquiry.  So this wonderful dog is living in a kennel with no constant human companionship. We try to spend time with him, but it’s not enough.  I think how alone and isolated he must feel.  He listens to every movement around him and wags his tail at the sound of our voices or other dogs passing by him."

We asked Sharon to see how he was with other dogs, and he did fine.  So we agreed to take him, and I then set about making his transportation arrangements. 

We had to fly him into Bozeman, Montana, about three hours south of us, because Northwest Airlines is still flying larger jets — A319s and A320s — into that airport.  All the other airlines have switched their Montana flights to the smaller regional jets (Canadairs and Embraers), which can’t take anything larger than a "large" crate … and those are about big enough for a Cocker Spaniel.  And Northwest now only flies regional jets into Missoula and Helena, too.  So for a dog of Mitch’s size, requiring an extra-large or giant crate, we’re down to one option … Northwest to Bozeman.  Thus we made reservations for Mitch to fly from Indianapolis to Minneapolis and on to Bozeman.

I drove down to Bozeman this afternoon to meet his 6:30 p.m. flight.  When the airline personnel brought him out in his crate on a dolly, I walked over and said, "Hi, Mitch!"  And this boy’s tail just started a-wagging.  Walking out of the terminal, Mitch went face-first into the curb, but he was so excited to be out of the crate and happy to be exploring it didn’t faze him at all.

We had an uneventful trip back to the ranch.  The biggest challenge was simply trying to keep Mitch in the back seat; he tried every opportunity to climb up front.  He is a very sweet dog, exactly as Sharon described him.  Alayne took the photo of me with Mitch right after we got home about 10:30 p.m.  As I write this, Mitch is in the yard checking things out after eating some dinner. 

And now it’s time for all of us to go to bed!

It was time for some geriatric equine medicine today — our old sighted Appaloosa, Crazy Horse, was due to see our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, for his regular joint injections.  He has bad arthritis, but for an ancient boy of 32 years, the joint injections every several months does wonders for him. 

We loaded him up in the trailer first thing this morning, but just as I was starting down the drive, Jodie called me from Widget’s House to say blind Penny wasn’t doing well.  She hadn’t eaten her breakfast (Penny always eats), and she was trembling and had labored breathing.  I asked Jodie to walk Penny out to the drive and I would take her into Missoula with me.  Sure enough, I could see Penny was pulling in her sides, breathing hard. 

While I was en route with Crazy and Penny, Alayne called ahead to our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, to let him know we were bringing Penny over.  I stopped at Dave’s clinic first, where X-rays showed Penny had developed pneumonia.  Dave started her on IV fluids and antibiotics, and she will stay there for the next couple of days.  (No photos, sorry!)

Then I headed to our printer for a press check on our spring newsletter.  (Spring?  I drove through a snowstorm this morning to Missoula, most of the way in four-wheel drive!)  After making some color adjustments on the press, I signed off on the print run and then drove out to Erin’s clinic, Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital. 

Crazy was breathing pretty hard himself when we arrived, so Erin tested him for heaves.  Part of the process involves putting a plastic bag over the nose, which helps assess respiratory function.  That’s what you see in the photo at the top of the post.  Erin concluded he didn’t have heaves, and his breathing was most likely just from the trailer ride on inflamed joints.

So then we moved on to the main event, which was treating those old joints.  Because we’re injecting steroids directly into the joints, the injection sites need to be thoroughly scrubbed and clipped and disinfected to make sure the needles don’t transport any bacteria from the skin into the joint itself.  In this photo Erin is injecting his right hock:

Here’s another view where she’s injecting his left hock from the inside:

And finally, she repeated the process on his front legs to relieve the arthritis around his coffin bone (that’s an old scar you see above the hoof wall there):

Through all this, Erin noticed I was hobbling myself, wincing and looking — as she described it — "pretty pathetic."  I explained that I had thrown my back out on Sunday, was taking some anti-inflammatory medication, but could still barely get dressed this morning.  And yes, I will admit that if you watched Crazy Horse and me today, you would conclude he was the spry one.  I asked Erin if she could inject my lower back with the same pick-me-up she was giving Crazy’s joints, but she … well, she declined.  Instead, she insisted on dispatching me to a chiropractor she recommended, who worked me in on short notice this afternoon.  The chiropractic adjustment definitely helped, and both Crazy Horse and I returned to the ranch in better shape than when we left. 

Alayne was fixing up the crates in Kelly’s Cottage the other night, putting in fresh bedding and fluffing it up for the "burrowers" (i.e., the Dachshunds) and the "mounders" (the ones who like to pull all their bedding into a mound, arrange it just so, and then lie down on it).  I was bringing dogs into the cottage while Alayne was doing this, and I looked over to see a Beagle face sticking out of a pile of bedding she’d set aside.

That’s deaf Stuart, hoping we wouldn’t notice him lurking under there, hiding next to his girlfriend Birdie.  Stuart loves Birdie, and he is always grooming her.  He especially likes licking her ears.  This drives her crazy after, say, 10 minutes or so of constant tongue-in-ear.  She finally says, "Enough already!" and then gets up in a huff and walks away from him.  (Some guys just never learn.)

Stuart stayed buried under the bedding while I went back to the house to get the camera.  I took the photo, and then promptly extracted him from underneath the pile and carefully placed him in his crate for the night.  Birdie gave Stuart a furtive "nice try" glance as I carried him past her.

—

One of our blog readers asked for a photo of blind Widget upon her return.  Well, I tried to get her up for a "I have returned!" stance, her little bowlegs a-flexin’ and her tail a-bobbin’, but she wasn’t interested.  She was doing what she does best, which is sleeping, and asked only that we wake her in time for dinner.  So here she was this afternoon, sacked out in the living room:

We had our fabulous team of groomers here on Saturday, bathing and clipping the dogs over at Widget’s House.  One of the dogs I wanted them to work on was Noodle the wobbly Collie mix, who has thick, wool-like hair that needs to be cleaned up often.  But because Noodle can’t really walk much, and she’s too heavy to carry the entire way over to Widget’s House (about 50 yards from our house), I decided to drive her over on the ATV.

One of the common sights out here in the Rocky Mountains is the rancher on his ATV, with the proverbial go-everywhere cow dog — often a Border Collie — perched behind the seat, going along for the ride and ready to round up cows on a moment’s notice.  As I carried Noodle out to the ATV, her eyes got bigger and bigger, as if she thought I had suddenly forgotten she was disabled and I was confusing her with, well, a working dog.

I pulled her onto the seat in front of me, wrapped an arm around her, and off we went.  Any time we went faster than, oh, 2 miles per hour, she would turn and look at me nervously.  I’d lean forward, she’d lick me on the face for reassurance, and then she’d go back to staring straight ahead with big eyes. 

Her first ATV ride was a piece of cake compared to what awaited her at Widget’s House.  A bathtub, electric clippers, a hair dryer, and three determined ladies who were going to spiff her up whether she wanted it or not.  Noodle was not exactly a happy customer, and when I went back to get her late in the afternoon, she gave me this "You betrayed me" look.  (Seen that before.)

I carried her out to the ATV again, swung my leg over, plopped her on the seat, and off we went on the return trip.  This time she was much more relaxed.  (Anything’s better than electric clippers, huh?)  Alayne was waiting with the camera when we pulled up to the house.  She got the photo above as I was getting ready to step off with Noodle under my arm.

Noodle was just relieved there weren’t any cows involved.

—

Widget is home!  She came back on Saturday, and is now back to her usual bossy, boisterous self!

This is little Daisy in her crate outside my office door.  She came to us with spine problems and a clump-clump-clump gait a couple of years ago.  But she had a flare-up and lost the use of her rear legs late on Tuesday afternoon, while I was on the way back to the ranch after dropping off Widget at the vet hospital.  (There is no law that says you can only have one medical crisis per day.)  Our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, walked me through a neurological test that evening, and determined that we could begin treating her with prednisone.  We needed to repeat the test the next morning and see if there was any improvement.  Yesterday morning Daisy’s tiny legs were working again, which indicated we were on the right course and should continue with the current steroid therapy.  If she lost deep-pain sensation, then we’d have to get far more aggressive, and off to the hospital she’d go.

But doctor’s orders included strict … very strict … bed rest for the next week, and Brenda wanted us to confine Daisy to the smallest, comfortable crate we had.  So Daisy has — quite unhappily, she’s quick to let you know — been confined in this crate in our living room.  We let her out to potty and stay with her, then scoop her up and put her back in the crate.  ("Letting her out to potty" is kind of notional anyway, since she’s incontinent and, well, it happens when it happens.)

Thus Daisy feels like she’s incarcerated and isn’t happy with her predicament.  As if to prove the point, she gave me this face while I was taking her photo this afternoon:

I walked into the kitchen and found Bailey using blind Callie as a chin rest.  I’m not sure how long they’d been like this, but Bailey looked very comfortable and Callie didn’t seem to mind at all.  They even stayed put while I went to get the camera.

Now, to answer the obvious questions, a) yes, we know Callie’s fat; b) no, it’s not her thyroid; and c) yes, she is on a strict diet.  Callie was cheered by the motto of the recent National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 24 – March 1, 2008), which was "Be comfortable in your genes."  She completely agreed with the organizer’s view that "Too often individuals struggle against their natural, genetically
influenced size just to fit into that pair of ‘skinny jeans’ in the
back of their closets. Fighting your natural size and shape can lead to
unhealthy dieting practices, poor body image and sometimes eating
disorders."

Although Callie doesn’t have to worry about fitting into a pair of skinny jeans (nor could she), she is convinced that the only eating disorder she suffers from is the diet we have her on. 

And speaking of ‘poor body image,’ Callie doesn’t find it helpful that we refer to her as "Pudgy Paws" and "Stubby Tubby."  (Contrary to how she appears in this photo, she actually does have back legs.)

Meanwhile, Bailey is just glad he’s got a big enough parking space for his chin.  He says, "Callie, honey, I wouldn’t change a thing.  I love you just the way you are."

Our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, just called to say that they have confirmed Widget’s diagnosis as the hemorrhagic gastroenteritis (see previous post).  Brenda’s husband, Dr. Britt Culver, ultrasounded Widget’s abdomen this morning and also did an echocardiogram of her heart, and all her organs look good.

Britt, an internal medicine specialist, did the echo because Brenda had detected a heart murmur in Widget yesterday.  Brenda was pretty sure that the murmur was because of the high packed cell volume in her blood, which makes the blood thicker and harder to pump.  Her heart hadn’t been able to adjust quickly enough to the extra load, which caused the murmur.  But only an echocardiogram could rule out other possible causes.

Widget’s PCV count was below 60% today, so the murmur is resolving and she is getting better.  Brenda said she hadn’t pooped any more blood, although she’s still throwing up a little.  All in all, Widget’s on the mend.

Probably the best sign is the "Widge-o-meter," her bobbing tail.  When it bobs, she’s feeling pretty good.  When it droops, she’s feeling bad.  Brenda reports that this morning, the Widge-o-meter is bobbing.

Whew.

About mid-morning I noticed blind Widget trying to throw up in my office … she was pretty quiet about it, no real gagging, but clearly needing to get something out.  Then she went to the front door, so I opened it and off she went.  I mentioned to Alayne that I’d seen her trying to vomit.  A short while later, Widget was woo-woo-wooing outside my office window.  In Widget-speak, she was saying "Doorman!  Doorman!"  I got up, let her in, and the routine started again … trying to throw up, then wanting to go out.  Her tail, normally upright and bobbing, drooped.

This time Alayne followed Widget outside.  A few minutes later she came back, alarmed, and said, "Widget is pooping pure blood … it’s just shooting out of her."  We watched Widget a bit longer, and sure enough, she squatted and <splat!> out came this stream of blood, arcing through the air.  Ohmigod.  Now, usually when you have colitis, you’ll see blood, but you’ll also have some diarrhea with it … but there was no poop with this blood at all.  Alayne collected a sample and found there was a lot of mucus in it, too.  Back in the house, Widget took a few sips of water, then threw it up.

I called our vet clinic in Helena and asked them to have our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, call me.  Just about 15 minutes later, Widget walked into the living room and vomited a huge pool of water … and speckled throughout the water were flecks of blood.  Oh, Lord.

Alayne and I stood there, and we were both thinking the same thing.  No, not Widget.  After all of our recent losses, the thought of something suddenly going terribly wrong with Widget … well, it raced through our minds.  I will admit, I started tearing up.  That’s when I realized I don’t have an emotional reserve left right now.

I called the clinic back to tell them I was bringing Widget in.  While I gathered my things, Alayne got the truck ready, and we spread out the thick fleece blankets that Margaret N. in Seattle sends us.  I took the photo of Widget in the back of the truck just before we left.  You can see she had already started scooting the blankets around to arrange the perfect custom-fit.  After all, a girl’s got to snuggle in for the 70-mile ride to Helena!

At the vet clinic, I let Widget out of the truck and took her over to the lawn to pee (they have grass, not snow, in Helena!).  She walked around a bit, then stooped, and pooped pure blood again.  Egads.  I carried her into the building and handed her over to a vet tech, who immediately took Widget away to draw blood.

In between her other scheduled appointments, Brenda found time to do a physical exam, and then came out to talk with me.  She said that given our description of what we’ve seen and her exam, she thought one possible suspect was hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, or HGE.  A key to diagnosing HGE is a very high PCV (packed cell volume) on her blood work.  But in addition to the blood work, Brenda was going to run additional diagnostics, as well as have her husband, Britt, our internal medicine specialist, look at Widget tomorrow.

I left little Widget at the clinic and drove back to the ranch.  About 5:45 p.m., Brenda called with the blood panel report — Widget’s PCV was 67%, consistent with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis.  If it does turn out to be HGE, that will be good news, because it is treatable.  But Brenda cautioned that we still have other tests pending, and until we get those back and until Britt can examine Widget and review all the findings, we can’t jump to that conclusion yet. 

That’s what we know at this point … I’ll update tomorrow with the latest.  In the meantime, please keep Miss Woo-Woo-Woo in your thoughts!