Rolling Dog Farm Blog

We’ve now posted our 2007 annual report online.  It’s a 4-page PDF that’s available on our main Web site’s home page.  The annual report shows what we accomplished during the year, including how many new arrivals there were and where they came from.  The last page has the summary financial information showing how we spent our donors’ generous gifts that make it possible for us to care for these special animals in the first place.  Every Briggs, every Ellie May, every Herbie … none of them would get the chance to be here if it weren’t for those gifts.  So our annual report is our way not only of being transparent and accountable as a nonprofit, but it’s also our way of being able to say to our donors, look what we were able to do because of you!

You can download the PDF directly by clicking here.

As always, the credit for the design work goes to our fabulous graphic designer, Terrel Armstrong!

This is our new arrival, wobbly blind Briggs, fresh from his eye surgery and neutering on Thursday.  Alayne drove over to Helena Saturday morning to pick him up.  I took the photo of Briggs on the living room couch this afternoon.  As I posted the week before, we had postponed his eye surgery after our vets, Brenda and Britt Culver, had found Briggs was suffering from a kidney disease called glomerulonephritis.

But what was causing the kidney disease?  One of the suspects was a tick-borne disease of some sort, among other things, and Britt ran a new battery of blood tests to see what they could find.  Well, it turns out that Briggs had Rocky Mountain spotted fever … which he contracted while living in Georgia.  On the titer for this disease, Brenda said you would typically expect to see a normal ratio of less than 1:64, and Briggs’ titer was 1:2048.

What’s interesting is that it’s likely his wobbliness is a result of the Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which in long-term, untreated cases can cause movement disorders.  We didn’t think his wobbliness looked like our usual cerebellar hypoplasia animals, but we couldn’t quite explain why … it was just different.

And his blindness could also be the result of the Rocky Mountain spotted fever!  As Brenda explained it to me, Briggs probably developed uveitis, an inflammatory disease of the eyes, because of the untreated Rocky Mountain spotted fever.  The uveitis, in turn, caused his filtration angles (the "drain valve" in the eye) to plug up, which led to the glaucoma that blinded him. 

As you may remember from my post about the type of eye surgery we were going to do for him, Brenda planned on implanting a prosthesis in the globe of each eye to keep his ‘natural’ look.  Because his body still had the antigens from the Rocky Mountain spotted fever circulating in his system, thus putting his immune system on heightened alert, Brenda was concerned that this would increase the risk of his body rejecting the prostheses.

So she consulted with our veterinary ophthalmologist in Spokane, Dr. William Yakely, to get his opinion on this case.  Dr. Yakely told Brenda that since they were already treating Briggs for the Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and since he had received other supportive therapy even before we got the diagnosis, that this would lessen the risks for rejection.  And if Briggs’ body did reject the eye implants, then we still had the option of enucleation. 

After reviewing all this with Brenda on Thursday morning, we agreed to proceed with the surgery as originally planned.  Brenda called Thursday evening to say all had gone well, and Briggs had come out of anesthesia just fine. 

It will be at least three weeks before we know if the prostheses "take," and as time goes on, the risks of rejection diminish.  We’ve done this on several animals and never had a rejection, but all we can do now is keep our fingers crossed.  Briggs was so happy to come home, and even though we tried to keep him isolated in a quiet room by himself, he wouldn’t stand for it.  He bayed and bayed until we let him out so he could be with everyone else.  He’s on multiple medications for his eyes and continues on doxycycline for the Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

How ironic that this poor little dog would have come down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever quite some time ago, was never treated for it, and then moved to the Rocky Mountains … where he was finally diagnosed and treated!  (Although as Medline reports, "Contrary to the name "Rocky Mountain," most recent cases have been reported in the eastern United States…." and it also occurs in Central and South America, too.)

For more detailed information on Rocky Mountain spotted fever in dogs, here’s a great write-up from the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

Just after I finished writing this blog post, I noticed Briggs sitting on the ramp outside my office window.  Alayne had let him out after feeding him dinner.  He seemed to be sitting there, staring at Ovando Mountain in the distance.  Maybe he was just thinking how his future is going to be so much brighter from now on:

Here’s the elderly lady who arrived yesterday evening — little Miss Duchess, an old blind-and-deaf girl from Carlsbad, California.  Alayne took the photo of me holding Duchess this afternoon.  We had agreed to take her last week, after a vet tech at the vet hospital emailed us about her.

The vet tech, Mina S., wrote that "a guy brought in his 14-year old Jack Russell to be put down. He was about 85 years old, and the dog had been living in the garage, with no attention, and he said she just slept all day and he was over it.  Despite being blind and deaf, the dog was so happy to be out for a walk and paid attention to, prancing around … we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it, and the vet refused to put her down."

This was a few months ago, and various staff members had fostered Duchess, but no permanent home surfaced for her.  And being shuffled around was taking its toll on this old girl.

Mina wrote last Thursday, "We’re really at a loss of what to do. We almost put her to sleep yesterday, simply because she has NO WHERE to go. We held off putting her down overnight, to try just a few more avenues, but nothing has worked out. You are truly our last hope for Duchess.  I’m sure you guys are terribly full, and the last thing you need is a blind and deaf Jack Russell — but this one truly is worth the effort to help.  She’s loving and sweet, but low maintenance, and just wants a safe place to sleep on a warm bed, and wander around (and she does love to eat!)."

I emailed Mina back on Friday to say we could take her.

So on Monday, even as Alayne and I were reeling from Oscar’s death, I made flight reservations to bring Duchess to Montana.  I will admit there was something therapeutic about doing this on the same day we lost Oscar.  There are some folks who will (for good reason) think we need our heads examined for taking in such an elderly dog, knowing heartbreak is not far off … especially after all of our recent losses.  And I don’t really have a good answer for that, other than to say that this little girl needed a place like the ranch, and here we are.

Yesterday morning, Mina dropped Duchess off at the San Diego airport at 6:15 a.m., and then waited until her Alaska Airlines flight took off for Seattle at 8:15 a.m.  She called me to say "Duchess is on her way!"  Mina was kind enough to pay for the airfare, even though we were planning on paying for the entire trip.  Duchess caught a connecting flight on Horizon Air in Seattle, and arrived in Missoula at 7 p.m.

For an old, blind-and-deaf dog who’s been through a lot of upheaval in her life, Duchess has settled in just fine.  She gets along with everyone, and is very happy just wandering around the house and yard.  And Mina was right, she does love to eat!  Her nose is incredible, and she can smell a dog treat at 10 yards.  Here’s a photo I took this afternoon, when she was looking for a treat she knew I had on the table next to me:

I know it looks like Alayne and I are choking the daylights out of this poor dog, but honest, we’re not!  This is Twist, the other half of the Oliver and Twist Dachshund duo who arrived just before last Christmas.  I was in the isolation cottage about 8 a.m. this morning, giving deaf Snowball his heart and stomatitis medications, when Alayne walked up to the window and said, "We’ve got a problem with Twist."

She was in Kelly’s Cottage, letting the dogs out, and Twist would not come out of his crate.  Usually he bolts right out and skitters across the floor to the door, lifting up his bad leg so it doesn’t slow him down.  But not today … he wasn’t budging.  Alayne reached in to pull him out, and that’s when she noticed his face was swollen. 

My first thought at seeing the swelling was an abscess, but then I noticed his eye on the other side of his face was also puffy — and that would suggest more of an insect bite of some sort, or a reaction to something. We brought Twist into the house and I took several photos of his face — including the one above — to email to our vets in Helena, Brenda and Britt Culver.  I wanted to see what they thought and whether this was something we could begin treating here, or whether he needed to go in for an exam.  I called the clinic and asked the staff to alert them that the photos were on the way.

When you live 70 miles from your vet, you learn to appreciate the benefits of telemedicine!  I take very high-resolution photos (we use lower-res versions for the blog) so Brenda and Britt can zoom in and see a lot of detail.

About 30 minutes later, Britt called after reviewing the photos.  He, too, suspected an insect bite.  He said a tooth root abscess would typically present with swelling farther up his face, and wouldn’t result in swelling around the other eye.  So he asked what we had in stock, and I ran through our Rolling Dog Ranch Pharmacy inventory of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories  and steroids. 

Britt had me start Twist on a twice-daily regimen of amoxicillin, prednisone, and injections of baytril.  He said that if we were right about the cause, the swelling should start coming down pretty fast.  And indeed it did … by noon Twist’s face was already looking better, and by this evening, it was almost normal. 

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I just got back from the airport in Missoula tonight after picking up a little old blind-and-deaf girl from California.  More on her tomorrow!

So after yesterday’s heartbreaking news about Oscar, here’s something that will hopefully bring a smile to all of us!  Alayne got this photo of wobbly Noodle sitting in the tire we use to hold the dogs’ outdoor water bucket.  This was the first time we’ve seen her do this, and she seemed quite happy there.  Despite her wobbliness — she’s much more compromised than her sister, Soba — Noodle loves to crawl under cots and into holes and other tight spots … and manages to get out just fine.  It’s almost like she just wants to prove she isn’t that disabled, thank you very much.

You may remember a while back that we had Noodle and the two wobbly brothers, Charlie and Smokey, measured for quad wheelchairs.  With all the talk about getting her wheels, maybe she figured she’d go ahead and try one. 

And speaking of those wheelchairs, we did get them but the snow has been too deep for our wobblers to use them!  We were starting the spring melt these past two weeks, but we’ve just had 24 hours of new snow, so it doesn’t look like we’re done with winter yet.  As soon as we get the snow down to a reasonable depth and can try out their chairs, we’ll post a video on the blog.

As Alayne was taking photos of Noodle, sister Soba wobbled over to check things out.  It wasn’t clear whether she was curious what her sister was up to, or just wanted to get her photo taken:

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Thank you to everyone who emailed us or posted such wonderful and kind comments on the blog about losing Oscar.  Alayne and I are very grateful for all the emotional support we get from so many compassionate people when we go through something like this.  We are just so touched by the thoughts that you share with us. Thank you!

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Of all our losses in recent years, this one hit us the hardest.

I have never known a dog more devoted to a person than Oscar was to Alayne, nor a person more devoted to a dog than she was to Oscar.  And now he’s gone.

Alayne’s "best little dog buddy ever," as she called him, died this morning.  It was 4 a.m.  Oscar was in his favorite place, doing his favorite thing, which was sleeping in our bed curled up next to Alayne.  That’s when his little heart gave out.

I had woken up at 2:20 a.m. for some reason — very odd for me — troubled by something but not sure what.  I finally got out of bed and headed to the kitchen to get something to eat, checked email, read a little, and then went back to the bedroom a few minutes before 4 a.m.  I had just settled down and was trying to fall asleep when I suddenly heard quiet sobs coming from Alayne.

I bolted up in bed and asked her what was wrong. 

"Oscar’s dead," she cried.  "He just died!"

Alayne had come awake when she heard a tiny burp-like sound from him, reached out to pet him, and realized something was wrong … he hadn’t responded.  As she ran her hand down his body, she could feel the bed was wet underneath him from urine leaking out.  And then came the awful realization that he was lifeless.

She got up, carrying his body in her hands, and walked into the bathroom.  She sat on the floor, cradling him and crying.  I rushed over and wrapped my arms around her.  I led her back to the bedroom, and we both sat on the bed, crying over this deaf, old miniature Dachshund who had come to mean so much to us.

Oscar was already 10 years old when he arrived at the ranch.  He had belonged to a little boy who absolutely doted on Oscar, and Oscar loved the little boy in return.  They did everything together, and Oscar would follow his friend everywhere, never letting him get out of sight.  At night Oscar slept on the little boy’s pillow.  The boy and his Dachshund were inseparable.  But the boy’s parents were convinced their son was spending too much time with Oscar and not enough with "real" friends, so they decided to take his little dog away and give him to someone else.  They came up with all kinds of reasons why Oscar had to go, but we learned from a relative what the real motivation was … and the relative was responsible for Oscar coming to the sanctuary. 

The little boy’s family had been Oscar’s third home thus far in his 10 years, and so when he arrived here he was scared, confused and terribly anxious.  But after hiding for days, he started coming out of his shell, and within a few weeks Oscar had attached himself to Alayne.  He had decided he was going to devote himself to her, just like he had to the little boy.  From that point on Oscar worshipped her. 

Alayne was everything to Oscar.  He would patiently wait by the window to keep an eye on her when she was outside, and then rush to the door, jumping up and down, barking, to greet her when she returned.  Oscar followed her from room to room, always staying by her side.  She had special "Oscar places" stashed around the house so he’d have a place to snuggle and burrow wherever she ended up.  Early on I started calling him "Alayne’s minion," as I’ve posted before.

She always took him in the truck when she went to Missoula or Helena, sharing cheeseburgers on the road with her little Dachshund friend.  He liked going in the truck so much that Alayne would have to take him along when she took the mail out to our postbox, about 1/4 mile away.  Oscar would see Alayne with a stack of mail in her hand and he’d start barking, jumping up and down again, demanding to go for a ride.  Even when the truck wasn’t going anywhere, he just loved being in it.

His relationship with me was much more complex.  While he and Alayne adored each other, Oscar wasn’t wild about sharing her with me.  At bed time, when I would lean over to kiss Alayne good night, Oscar would invariably rush out from underneath the covers to start licking her on the face.  Then he’d stop, look over at me and growl, and go back to licking her on the face.  It got to the point where I’d have to hold the growling Dachshund back with one hand so I could get a decent kiss.  (I wish I were making this up but I’m not; that’s what I had to put up with for the past six years!)  At times I’d finally growl back at him, "She’s my wife, buddy, not yours!"

But as much as he thrived on Alayne’s adoration, there was a part of Oscar that wanted to be treated like a big, rough-and-tumble dog.  So he loved to roughhouse with me.  At night Alayne usually headed to bed first, and when I made my way to the bedroom, Oscar would be lying on top of the bed, staring in my direction, waiting for me to come through the door.  He’d growl, leap to his feet and then rush to the edge of the bed, barking ferociously at me.  I’d chase him around the bed, then he’d come running at me, snarling and snapping and acting like he wanted to chew my hand off.  (Fortunately in recent years he only had one tooth left.)

To bring the wrestling match to a close, all I’d have to do is bend down to kiss him .. and he’d suddenly stop, reach up with his little head, and start licking me on the face.  Then he’d turn to look at Alayne — "See, I won that round, didn’t I?" — bark triumphantly, and head over to burrow under the covers next to her.

Only to come roaring back out when I tried to get that goodnight kiss.

This morning, hours after he died, Alayne was still holding Oscar in her arms.  She couldn’t let go.  I offered to drive him to our vet clinic in Helena for cremation, but she insisted on taking him herself.  "It’s our last ride together," she told me.  Honestly, today I am grieving as much for her as I am for him.

Finally, Alayne mustered up the emotional strength to get in the truck.  We wrapped Oscar in a fleece blanket and I laid him on the passenger seat.  And off they went together, one last time.

After several less than happy blog posts over the past couple of weeks, I thought we should start out the week with something light and cheery … like Mr. Orangutan’s adventures at the ranch.  A wonderful friend of the animals, Sue R. in Colorado, had sent Franz the Orangutan just before Christmas to help cheer up Shiloh, our boy who has hemangiosarcoma.

Well, I was embarrassed to tell Sue that Shiloh turned out to be … um … afraid of Mr. Orangutan.  We’ve never seen a dog actually afraid of a stuffed toy before, but here’s how well the introduction went … and this was after coaxing and cajoling Shiloh to stay on the same bed with Mr. Orangutan long enough for me to get some photos!  He kept trying to get away from the scary orange thing:

Then we tried Mr. Orangutan with wobbly Allie, who wasn’t afraid of Mr. Orangutan but wasn’t interested in playing with him.  So we put Mr. Orangutan away for a while, until last week, when Alayne brought him out for the Certified Toy Shredders.  In the photo at the top of the post that’s blind Goldie starting to go to work on him.  You’ll notice Mr. Caterpillar on top of the couch.  Despite the holes in his head, Mr. Caterpillar continues to survive, and … I must say … gets more respect than Mr. Orangutan.

Here’s Goldie trying to decide if she wants to eat the orange fluff hanging off her mouth or just spit it out:

After removing the squeakers, Goldie was naturally no longer interested in Mr. Orangutan, so Belvie decided to take out some latent Dachshund aggression on the hapless primate:

And finally, the now dead Mr. Orangutan goes from slaughter to slumber, with Daisy using him as a pillow:

That was one morning in the life of Mr. Orangutan at the ranch.

I had a call last Thursday evening from Dr. Fred Wininger, the neurologist at Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital, with some more answers about what happened to our blind Shepherd Pepper.  It was exactly a week after Pepper died, and the information he gave us helped shed some more light on her disease.  I took the photo above of Pepper in the MRI machine at WSU, and below you will see an image from the MRI that Dr. Wininger emailed me.  I didn’t use these when I wrote about her death because, well, they seemed beside the point at the time.

After we made the decision to euthanize Pepper, Dr. Wininger asked me if we would give him permission to operate on Pepper the following day to further the research into the kind of tumor she had.  (The fact that she would have been euthanized the previous day did not affect what they would learn.)  Cases like Pepper’s are so rare that they had not done this surgery at WSU in two years.  Moreover, Dr. Wininger said they were trying to determine if the MRI images could give the neurologists a better "signature" or reading on exactly what type of tumor it was before doing the brain surgery.  As I reported on the day we lost Pepper, they suspected two possible types of tumors — a choroid plexus tumor and a meningioma. 

Even after radiation therapy, which is the second step after surgery to remove the cancer, a choroid plexus tumor would come back in just a few months, while a meningioma might take up to a year to return.  That information alone might make a difference to another family, trying to decide if surgery on their beloved animal was an option.

I told Dr. Wininger that we would definitely let him operate on Pepper, and that if her case helped advance veterinary medicine’s understanding of these terrible tumors, that would make us feel better about her tragic outcome. 

When he called on Thursday evening, he had just come out of an hour-long meeting with WSU’s veterinary pathologists who had been studying Pepper’s biopsy for days.  The pathologists told Dr. Wininger that they had "never seen anything like it before" … and that they still did not know what kind of cancer it was.  It was in the choroid plexus region but was not the type of tumor they typically see there.  So they were mystified by what they found.

Moreover, the tumor was "very infiltrative," meaning it had spread many small branches throughout her brain.  Dr. Wininger said that they couldn’t fully detect this from the MRI images, and that the degree of infiltration meant "it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to remove it all."  And, he added, given the time it would have taken on the operating table to try and get the entire tumor out, it was even less likely she could have survived the surgery. 

As if that wasn’t enough, because they don’t know what kind of tumor it was, Dr. Wininger said they would have no idea whether it would have responded to radiation therapy.

After reviewing all of this, Dr. Wininger told me he was convinced we made absolutely the right decision to let Pepper go.  And that, of course, made Alayne and me feel a lot better.  We hadn’t second-guessed this decision on Pepper — when I saw her on the gurney when they wheeled her in for the last time, I was sure she couldn’t survive the surgery and its aftermath — but it is a relief to have clinical evidence to reaffirm such a difficult decision. 

Now, the question remained, why did Pepper’s symptoms — the seizures and the coma-like condition — happen so suddenly?  Here’s one of the MRI scans of her head:

Her skull is at the top of the image, and you’ll see a dark horizontal-shaped space in the middle of her brain … it kind of looks like a water balloon being squeezed in the center.  That’s the fluid-filled dilated ventricle inside her brain where the cerebral spinal fluid has backed up, creating the reservoir.  As the tumor continued to block the spinal fluid from flowing out and down her spinal cord, it kept backing up inside the brain and expanding that reservoir, putting relentless pressure on her brain.  Dr. Wininger said that ventricle is at least two to three times normal size — so you can imagine what this was doing to her brain.

The pathologists told Dr. Wininger that the reason her symptoms came on so fast is because the tumor had shut off the "valve" very acutely, or quickly.  With the type of tumor they more typically see, this is a gradual process … which is why the dogs that come in have much more mild symptoms than Pepper did.   

I hope you don’t mind all this detail, but Dr. Wininger’s update helped give us closure, both emotionally and clinically, and I wanted to share that with you.  WSU is cremating Pepper’s body and we will be getting her ashes back soon.  That will provide the final closure for us.

After two weeks in the hospital, I finally brought blind Bo back to the ranch today.  I had taken him in for head X-rays and a neurological evaluation because of sudden and unexplained episodes of nystagmus and loss of balance.  Our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, had asked me to leave him at the hospital for further tests and evaluation, and she also wanted to start treating him with antibiotics and steroids to see if his clinical signs would improve.

His symptoms have improved but have not gone away, and after further consultations with the internal medicine specialists and neurologists at Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital, the next step will be an MRI of his head.  (A horse’s head and lower limbs are the only part of the horse body that will fit in an MRI!)  We will get that scheduled in the next week. 

I took the photo above of Erin with Bo in his stall at the clinic this morning.  And then, much to Erin’s consternation, I started photographing a series of "action" shots as she led Bo outside to our waiting horse trailer.  I figured this perspective would be a little "something different."  Here’s the first in the series:

And here she is rounding the corner with trusting Bo following along behind:

Finally, she brings Bo to a halt at the back of the trailer:

And then, like all of our blind horses, he loaded right up like a champ.  When I got back to the ranch and led him out to his corral, he went straight to his feeder and started eating hay.  He didn’t pay any attention to his new girlfriend, blind Guadalupe, but she was so excited to have him back that she raced around the corral, bucking and kicking up her heels.  He pretended not to notice.  (He’s the strong, silent type.)

Our vet Dr. Brenda Culver called last night to say that Briggs’ initial bloodwork showed low protein levels.  After further tests and evaluation today, Brenda told me this afternoon that she and Britt determined that Briggs has a kidney disease called glomerulonephritis.  The filters in his kidneys aren’t working properly, and protein — rather than being kept and used by the body — is getting washed out of his system along with the wastes.  You can read a really interesting and detailed explanation of this disease here.

This is caused by some type of inflammation that could be triggered by a number of things, including tick-borne diseases, bartonella or toxoplasmosis, among others.  (We already know Briggs is heartworm-negative.)  So Britt has sent more bloodwork in to test for a variety of these potential causes.  Until we get those results back next week and can treat Briggs accordingly, Brenda says we don’t want to challenge his system anesthetically, and thus she is postponing his eye surgery.

On the good news front, Britt said his neuro exam did not indicate any intercranial cause of his wobbliness (i.e., a lesion or tumor of some sort), and chest and abdominal X-rays also looked good, as did an ultrasound of all of his organs.  So if we can just get his kidney problem sorted out and treated, we can take care of his eyes.  In the meantime, Brenda is doing pain management and keeping him comfortable.

Please keep our little blind boy in your thoughts.