Rolling Dog Farm Blog

On the way back from taking Trooper and Popeye to the vet in Helena today (see post above), I decided to take some photos of the road home — during the last 10 or so miles, from just north of Helmville on Montana Highway 141 all the way to the ranch.  So here’s a quick travelogue.  And yes, I did take them while driving, but don’t worry, I wasn’t looking through the viewfinder as I drove … just using the autofocus and clicking away!

In the first photo at top, I’ve driven past Helmville and am heading toward the junction with Montana Highway 200 at the Blackfoot River.  In this next photo I’m on Hwy 200, now headed west.  That’s Ovando Mountain in the distance … the ranch is at the base of the mountain:

Still heading west, and after this curve I’ll start up an incline:

Now I’m at the top of the hill and about to drop down into the broad valley called Kleinschmidt Flat, where the ranch is.  That’s the Swan Range in the distance:

In this next shot below I’ve turned right, or north, off Hwy 200 and onto our county road that runs north-south.  You can see why it’s called Kleinschmidt Flat, right?  (The Kleinschmidts were the original settlers out here in the 1800s.)  You can’t see the road sign from the highway, so it doesn’t do any good to look for it:

Here I’m now headed due north on Kleinschmidt Flat Road, towards Ovando Mountain in the distance:

About two miles farther on, I’ve crossed Dry Gulch Road, which runs east-west across the Flat, and now you can begin to see the ranch buildings behind the sign (click on the photo for a larger version and you can read the sign):

A little bit further and here’s a better view of the ranch:

Our drive, a private lane, is coming up on the right-hand side farther down the road:

Here’s where Rolling Dog Ranch Lane starts, and it continues across the ranch, eventually turning south in the middle of the property and connecting with Dry Gulch Road at the other end.  (The wind has turned our signpost a little!)  On the right is our new hay barn, and Widget’s House is behind it to the left:

I’ve turned down our lane … there’s the hay barn again, and Beauty’s Barn is the first large structure on the right past the small "mini-barn":

And next is our snowed-over sanctuary sign, with a closer view of Beauty’s Barn.  That’s blind Bridger and his girlfriend blind Madison in the corral outside their mini-barn.  Note how much snow we have, and then compare this photo to the very first photo, taken just 10 miles away, and see how little snow there was outside Helmville.  Typically we have way more snow than surrounding areas:

That concludes today’s travelogue!

(Note:  Click on any photo for a larger version.)

It was a happy ending that wasn’t.  In fact, it ended tragically.

That’s Luke in the photo, a blind hound in a rural Virginia animal control shelter.  The day he started his journey to a new life here in Montana turned out to be his last day.  It really doesn’t get worse than this.

A week ago today, I received an email from Tina R., a shelter employee.  Tina wrote:

I was told to contact you to see if you can help a blind hound we have at our shelter in Berryville, Va. I see you are in Montana so I don’t know if this is possible. But maybe you have other contacts closer to us. Luke came in as a stray. He had a head injury. The vet thinks someone hit him. He is currently blind. He is on Prednisone but it is not helping so far. The vet said he is probably going to stay blind. I attached a picture of him. Please let me know if you can help him in any way.

After a couple of phone calls and emails with Tina, we had our vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, talk with the shelter’s vet about his diagnosis.  We wanted to have a better idea of what to expect.  He told Brenda that the dog had come in with a very swollen head but no other signs of injury … no broken bones, no blood.  The only other visible sign was blindness.  He assumed that the dog had suffered trauma of some sort, either at the hands of a person or was hit by a car.  With a very limited budget from the shelter, he was only able to give Luke an injection of a powerful steroid to reduce the swelling, and he prescribed continued prednisone therapy.  The swelling disappeared, Luke went back to the shelter, and that’s when Tina contacted us. 

Still, we were puzzled, as was Brenda, by this scenario and the impact on Luke’s vision.  It just seemed odd that a dog could sustain enough trauma to produce that kind of swelling and lose his vision, but not have any other cranial nerve or other symptoms resulting from the impact.  The shelter’s vet said he had never seen anything like it in his 25 years of practice.  Brenda called our veterinary ophthalmologist in Spokane, Washington, to discuss Luke’s case, and the eye specialist said he hadn’t encountered anything quite like that before either.

We agreed to take Luke, and I set about last week trying to figure out how we would get him from northern Virginia to Montana.  We needed someone who could pick him up from the shelter, take him to a vet for a medical exam and health certificate for travel, purchase an airline crate, board him for a few days, and then get him to the airport to catch his flight.  I contacted one of our wonderful supporters in the Washington, D.C., area, Becca K., and asked if she could help.  Becca has two disabled dogs of her own.

Becca graciously offered to help, and yesterday morning she and her sister drove out to the shelter to get Luke.  She had already made an appointment to take Luke to her vet on Saturday afternoon, and in the meantime I had made a reservation for Luke at a doggie daycare and boarding facility near Dulles airport that Becca had recommended.

Alayne and I were just sitting down to lunch yesterday afternoon when the phone rang.  It was Becca, calling with a report on what her vet had found out about his eyes and how he was doing.  She said, "You’ve got a very sweet Foxhound coming to you!"  Becca said he was friendly, energetic, and bayed like a true hound.  He had done well on the car ride from the shelter to the vet clinic, about a 45 minute trip.  She said he was a really nice boy.  Becca said that on a leash, Luke seemed to walk into everything, but when they took the leash off in the exam room, he managed to navigate around without running into much.  This despite the fact that he had no pupillary light reflex, or PLR, and no menace (or blink) reflex.  Becca’s vet also thought Luke had suffered head trauma, but was perplexed by the absence of other symptoms.

The vet clinic was located in a PetsMart, so after the exam Becca was going out to purchase his crate and then call us with the dimensions, which we needed to know to make flight reservations.  We hung up, and I filled Alayne in on the conversation.

Just 15 minutes later the phone rang.  It was Becca again.  I could tell right away her voice was anguished.  She said, "We’ve had a serious turn for the worse, Steve."  I said, "What do you mean?"  I was incredulous, then sick to my stomach, as she told me what happened.

After getting off the phone with me earlier, Becca said Luke had started mouthing the coat she was wearing.  Then he began snapping at it.  As Becca tried to brush him off and tell him to stop, Luke began biting her coat furiously, ripping at it.  He was oblivious to her efforts to get him to stop, and getting more aggressive by the second.  When Becca started pushing him off, Luke growled and then lunged at her, biting her in the chest.  Becca’s sister rushed over to pull him off, and Luke whirled around and bit her, too.  Becca’s vet stepped in and Luke bit her, too. 

In fact, the vet told me later, Luke was biting "anything in front of him … clothing, people, furniture.  It was uncontrollable.  I finally threw a towel at him, and he shredded the towel in seconds."   He attacked everything in the room.

And then it was over, just as quickly as it had started.  Whatever had possessed him was suddenly gone.  Becca’s vet carefully led Luke down the hall and into a kennel.  Fortunately none of the three people Luke attacked suffered serious injuries.

Becca told me it was so frightening because they couldn’t get him to stop, and he seemed to be in a "zone" where he was unreachable.  She said it wasn’t the same dog.  Becca was in shock, as was I, listening to her describe what unfolded in the exam room.   

The vet told me it was almost as if it were a seizure activity of some sort.  "But," she said, "I’ve been practicing veterinary medicine for a very long time and I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never seen this before in my career.   I can’t explain it.  Clearly it’s neurological, but what … well, I have no idea.  This is, I’m sorry to tell you, a dangerous dog."  She didn’t think it was rabies because Luke had been at the shelter long enough that other signs would have appeared before now.  He also didn’t show any of the other symptoms of a rabid dog. 

Becca and I stayed on the phone, replaying what had happened and trying to figure out what we could do.  We were in disbelief.  A day that had started out with such joy and promise was ending in tragedy.  As we worked through what we couldn’t do — put anyone else at risk, take him to the boarding facility, let alone put him on an airplane — we were left with the only thing we could do … and that was to put Luke to sleep at the clinic.

As we reached that decision, Becca and I both started crying.  I could not believe we were going to euthanize a dog we had never known … and a dog who was just about to get a second chance at life with us in Montana.  And yet Luke was now our responsibility.  He was our dog, and it was up to us.  Here we were, making that awful decision and grieving for a dog we’d never met.  It really was one of the worst moments in my life.  Having just put our beloved old Dillon to sleep a week ago, I sure wasn’t ready to make that decision again so soon.   

I had asked the vet if she thought we had any option other than euthanasia.  She said, "I wish I did, but I think the best place for this dog is heaven."

We wondered whether Luke was beaten over the head because he had done this before, or whether this "aggression seizure" was a result of the trauma and thus neurological damage.  There is something called "Canine Rage Syndrome" — or more accurately, "idiopathic aggression" — described in the literature, and maybe this was it.  But we’ll never know.

Becca and I talked through it some more, hoping to find some other answer, but it was clear what we needed to do.  I asked Becca to tell her vet what we decided, and to please proceed.  We both hung up the phone in tears.  I just couldn’t believe the first day of Luke’s new life was also his last.

Alayne had come into my office after hearing my end of the conversations with Becca and the vet.  She was horrified when I told her what had occurred.  I called the shelter and left a voicemail message asking them to call me.  A short while later Tina called, and I told her what had happened.  She had the same reaction we did, which was complete shock.  Tina said they had never seen Luke do anything like that, and if they had, they obviously would never had asked us or anyone else to take him.  She said the entire shelter staff had been so happy Saturday morning, knowing Luke was going off to Montana to live with us.  I thanked Tina for contacting us in the first place, and assured her that we knew Luke hadn’t shown this kind of behavior before or they wouldn’t have contacted us.  I told her how sorry we were — for Luke, for them, for Becca and us.  I asked Tina to let us know the next time they took in a blind dog and couldn’t adopt it out, because we would certainly help if we could.

Not too long afterwards, Becca called again from the vet clinic to say Luke was gone.  She said, "He’s in a better place now."

And that’s how Saturday ended.  With a lot of broken hearts across the country, for a dog we couldn’t save after all.

Just a quick post to report that our vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, called yesterday evening with good news on Pepper.  The growth on her side turned out to be a deep abscess, not a tumor of some sort.  And she is responding well to her IV antibiotic therapy, with her temperature almost normal.  However, as a result of the abscess Pepper had begun developing septicemia, which can be life-threatening.  So although she’s definitely making progress, it may be a couple more days before we know she’s overcome that.  But at the moment we have reason to be optimistic.

Jodie called me from Widget’s House shortly after 8 a.m. this morning to say something was wrong with blind Pepper.  Pepper hadn’t eaten breakfast, she wouldn’t get up, and she wouldn’t come out of her crate.  I grabbed a thermometer and headed over. 

By the time I got there, Jodie had managed to coax Pepper out of her crate, but I could tell from looking at this sweet Shepherd mix that she was one sick girl.  Jodie also pointed out a lump she had just noticed on Pepper’s side.  I ran my hand over her side, felt the lump, and thought, "Uh oh."  I had barely put the thermometer in Pepper when the numbers started racing upwards … and I knew she’d have a very high fever.  Seconds later, the thermometer stopped at 105.1 degrees.   

[Normal body temperature for a dog ranges between 100.5 Fahrenheit (38.1°C) and 102.5 Fahrenheit (39.2°C).]

I called our clinic in Helena, Montana Veterinary Specialists, to let them know we were on our way.  A short while later, I walked Pepper out to the drive, lifted her into the truck, and Alayne drove her to Helena.

Our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, called this evening to say Pepper is on IV fluids and antibiotics, and her temperature has come down to just over 103.  But at this point we don’t know what the problem is.  Blood work and other tests are pending.  Chest X-rays looked normal.  Brenda pulled cells from the lump but said she got a "mixed bag" of cytology results.  There were no neoplastic (or cancerous) cells but a variety of other cell types, yet nothing definitive.  Brenda’s husband, Dr. Britt Culver, is our internal medicine specialist there and he will look at Pepper tomorrow and probably ultrasound the growth.

At this point that’s all we know.  I took these photos of Pepper this morning before Alayne took her over to the vet hospital.

In a post last week, I reported that Bo our blind Appaloosa was experiencing episodes of nystagmus, or rapid eye movement, and sometimes showed some mild incoordination when this happened.  I had taken him to see our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital, last Monday for an exam.  After getting him home that Monday evening, I led him off the trailer and we started walking to the barn when — suddenly — his eyes began darting back-and-forth and then his legs buckled.  He managed to pull himself together and didn’t collapse, but it was a scary moment for both of us.  It was much more severe than what we’d seen before.

Unfortunately, he has continued to have similar episodes since then.  The most recent and most dramatic one came this morning.  When Gloria went into his stall to lead him out to his corral, she noticed Bo was having the nystagmus again.  She haltered him and they were walking out together when he started staggering, then crossed his legs in front of each other, uncrossed them, and swayed from side to side.  He only stayed upright by finally planting his feet far apart. 

What is so odd is that these episodes only last for very brief periods of time … less than a minute … and then he suddenly is okay.  They’re unpredictable, fleeting, happen at different times of the day, and happen indoors and outdoors.  And they’re not related to any circling behavior that could make him dizzy.

I was already scheduled to bring Bo in today to see Erin again, so I had Gloria call Erin and tell her what she’d seen Bo do.  After earlier consulting with an internal medicine specialist colleague at Washington State University, Erin had planned to take X-rays of Bo’s head to try and find out if there were any tumors or growths or changes in bone structure that could give us some clues as to what is causing this to happen. The internist had told us that inner ear infections were essentially unheard of in equines, so we needed to be looking for other explanations.

During her exam today, Erin was able to induce not only the nystagmus but also the lack of coordination in Bo … but only when we walked him in tight circles to the right.  During the exam last week we induced the nystagmus but no other symptoms, no matter which direction we moved him.

In the photo above, Erin is X-raying Bo’s head for a top-down view.  Erin’s colleague, Dr. Angela Langer, stepped in to assist with the radiography.  In this next shot Erin is taking a side-view X-ray while vet tech Amanda holds Bo: 

And here Erin is looking at the X-rays, which didn’t show any abnormal growths or changes in the bone structure:

But clearly something is going wrong.  So Erin is now bringing another internal medicine specialist onto the case, this one at the University of California – Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who specializes in equine neuromuscular diseases.  With the two internists on board, along with Erin — who is a board-certified veterinary surgeon herself — we have an incredible amount of expertise trying to figure out what is happening to our blind boy.

Meanwhile, Erin asked me to leave Bo at the hospital so she could begin some aggressive treatment for the symptoms and monitor him closely for the next few days.  She started him on IV antibiotics, steroids, and anti-inflammatories.

—

In that second photo you might have noticed someone in the back corner wearing a hat and looking like he was photographing us.  Well, that’s no apparition.  That was Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance photojournalist Mark Osler from Denver.  Mark has been with us for the past three days on assignment for AARP to do a story on the ranch.  (Okay, let’s get this over with right now:  Alayne is … shall we say … "post-50" and I am a very tender 49 myself — but not for much longer.  Egads.)  We’ll let you know when the AARP piece appears.  But, with a photojournalist here for three days, Alayne and I have been out of the office more than usual and have fallen way behind.  In my case, I now have 104 emails in my inbox waiting for a response.  So if you’ve called or emailed in the past few days and haven’t heard from us yet, please bear with us.  Tomorrow is catch-up day!

—

Alayne took this series of photos this morning of little Daisy climbing into a chair in the living room.  Daisy is one of our Dachshunds with neurological problems … she walks with an odd gait, kind of rocking back and forth on her hindquarters, and she makes a clump-clump-clump sound with her tiny feet as she goes.  But she’s also a bossy little thing, and believes everything is within her grasp … including that chair.  The first photo above was her initial attempt; she didn’t quite clear it so she regrouped for try No. 2, which Alayne captured in these subsequent shots.  (Notice in that photo who’s in the other chair.  Yes, that’s Widget alright.)

So here she is preparing for the second attempt:

And now she’s launched:

She just barely makes it over the goal line:

She’s pulling her hindquarters onto the chair:

And finally, success!

On Friday evening, as I was driving back from Missoula after saying goodbye to dear old Dillon, Alayne called me in the truck to say I had just received an email about a blind Beagle named Briggs.  He was on death row in a rural Georgia animal control shelter.  The email, which came from someone we don’t know, included a link to the Beagle’s PetFinder page with a photo.  Alayne said, "He looks just like Widget."

I got home, read the email and looked at the photo of Briggs. Yep, looked like the Widge.  Alayne and I discussed it and decided we’d offer to take the dog.  I planned on Saturday morning to email Morgan S., who runs Atlanta Beagle Rescue, and ask if she could go rescue this Beagle and help send him out to us.  Morgan was the person who had sent us Widget, many years ago, and more recently sent us blind Willie as well.

Amazingly, when I got up Saturday morning and walked into my office, I had an email waiting for me from … Morgan!  The subject line read:  "Widget’s Cousin?"  She was emailing to say, "I’m pulling this little guy today…" and it was Briggs.  Morgan wanted to know if we’d be able to take him.  I emailed her right back to say yes.

About 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Morgan emailed again.  She wrote, "We successfully got Mr. Briggs out today. He’s very sweet! I think you may get a two-for-one because aside from being blind he’s also wobbly."  Morgan attached a photo she took of him, which is what you see above. 

On Sunday evening, Morgan emailed to say, "When he got up this morning he actually couldn’t get up – he looked a bit like Bambi on the ice. Freaked him out and me! I carried him outside and once he "walked" around a bit it got better…. When I woke him up from a nap this afternoon he went in circles a bit before he got his bearings and walked out into the yard. Aside from his eyes he doesn’t have any outward appearance of an injury or anything that might explain this."

She shot some video of Briggs so we could see him, and here it is:

As you can see, he clearly has some kind of neurological issue, but exactly what we can’t tell.  He’s a "two-fer" indeed.  Morgan is going to take him to her vet this week, and then we will work on his flight reservations for his trip to Montana.

—

Alayne and I wanted to thank everyone who posted such kind and heartfelt comments about losing Dillon.  We are very, very touched by your compassion.  It’s never easy to write those posts about the death of one of our beloved animals, but we are always overwhelmed by the emotional support we receive in response.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

— 

We lost our oldest boy, Dillon, yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t been able to walk in months, yet his eyes still lit up and he could still catch a tossed dog cookie in the air, even lying down.  He spent his days on a bed in our living room, right outside my office.  That’s where I took the photo of him not too long ago, in a new bed that Sue R. from Colorado kindly sent him.  But in the past couple of weeks his body became stiffer and stiffer, and then he struggled to get sternal.  And finally, somewhere in the past several days, the light in his eyes went out.  He wasn’t enjoying life any longer.  He let us know.

So yesterday Alayne and I put fleece blankets on the stretcher, laid Dillon on it, and carried him out to the truck.  I drove Dillon into Missoula, where our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, helped him on his way.  I held Dillon’s head in my hands and cried as his life slipped away.

Oh, even a day later, this is so hard to write.

We called Dillon our "old lion" for the thick scruff of fur around his neck. He was one of our original "Seattle six-pack" of dogs that moved from Seattle to Montana with us in 2000.  He had been traumatized as a puppy, and ended up in a small no-kill shelter in Shelton, Washington at the age of one.  There he spent the next four years in a small outdoor pen, scared to death of people and considered ‘unadoptable’ by the shelter as a result. 

We had adopted Dolly from the same shelter earlier.  Dolly had also been traumatized from abuse and was one of their ‘unadoptables’ as well.  A year after adopting Dolly we realized poor Dillon was still there, so Alayne and I drove back to Shelton to get him, too.  Dillon turned out to be even more frightened than Dolly, and restoring his faith in people took much longer than it did for her.  He came to accept us easily enough, but the sight of other people would send him fleeing.  Only in recent years did he stop hiding from people, though he would still keep a safe distance.

Of all the original six dogs, Dillon was the quietest one, the most likely to remain in the shadows.  He was never one to come running up to get attention and some petting.  No, he would amble over in a tentative, stealthy way, very quietly … the first you knew he was there was when you realized he was pressing his body against your leg.  You’d feel this pressure, look down and there he was.  This was his signal for "Okay, love me up!"

Other than love from us, the thing Dillon enjoyed most was rolling in the snow.  Sadly, he was too stiff this entire winter to roll at all.  But how his eyes still shined.  And for some reason, all the other dogs loved to sleep with their "Uncle Dillon,"  as I posted here and here.

I took little blind Goldie with me yesterday to help cope on the long drive home.  It seemed fitting to have her there, since Dillon was the reason we got her in the first place.  I wanted her to be able to say goodbye to her Uncle Dillon.

As I write this, Goldie is asleep on his bed outside my office.

Alayne and I have already lost more animals than most people ever will … in a bad year for us, it’s probably what most people lose in a lifetime.  It’s the nature of doing what we do.  But driving back from Missoula yesterday evening, I wondered why we seemed to grieve as much for the ones we’ve had for a long time — like dear old Dillon — as we do for the ones we’ve had for only a short while.  I realized that for a beloved old dog like Dillon, we grieve because we loved him so much and for so long … 12 years … and thus a part of our life died with him.  For the ones who die unexpectedly and early, I think we grieve not only for the loss but also for the time we didn’t have with them.  Either way, grief hurts.  A lot.

This is how we’ll remember our old lion … side by side with another of our beloved seniors, Pappy, who we lost last year:

Goodbye, you sweet old boy.  We love you.

Today is blind Cash’s first birthday — Happy Birthday, Cash!  He’s officially a big, sort-of-grown-up yearling … not a foal any longer.  Cash arrived at the tender age of 4 weeks of age back in March last year from Alabama, a tiny little thing who was as cute as can be.  In the photo above, you see what he looked like on his first day at the ranch.  Now he’s Mr. Full-of-Himself, a self-confident, brash fellow who likes to torment his older "sisters," blind Nikki and blind Destiny, by playing the bratty little brother.

To show you the difference a year makes, Alayne took this next photo of me with Cash this afternoon … in the middle of a howling snowstorm:

Hard to believe it’s the same boy, huh?

Mary Y., who first contacted us about Cash when he was born blind and asked if we could take him, emailed us this morning to wish him a happy birthday.  Mary wrote: "I will never forget how it felt when I found Rolling Dog and heard from you.  Thoughts of blind horses and having a blind foal never ever even crossed my mind.  Teaching Cash to drink milk and preparing him for his trip to Montana have been the most memorable times in my life.  My favorite book as a child was "The Blind Colt," I still have that book and I pulled it out when we found out Cash was blind.  I held that book and cried and cried and I knew he had to live … and we both cried when Rolling Dog made a way for this precious baby to come to Montana. Thanks again from the bottom of our hearts!  Please hug your yearling for us!  (Oh, by the way, I hope he is still precious, or maybe a little sweet devil like his sister!)"

Um, I think Nikki and Destiny would say he’s a "little sweet devil."

I was in the cat house this morning taking photos of blind Herbie for our monthly email newsletter, and as usual, Herbie was meowing … and meowing … for attention.  Taking his photo wasn’t enough attention.  And although he’s already had his 15 minutes of fame, I couldn’t resist posting these new shots. 

What he does is zoom back and forth on the shelves along the wall, calling out to us.  When I say "zoom," I mean it … it was difficult getting decent photos today because he was in constant motion.  It’s hard to believe he can’t see a thing when he’s like this.  Herbie stays up on those shelves most of the time, or he’s on top of the medical cages along the back wall.  He’s up there so often, in fact, and comes down so rarely, that we finally put a litter box on top of those medical cages.  It’s not that he doesn’t know how to come down … note the dive into the cat food tub in yesterday’s post.  He apparently just prefers being a high-rise kitty.

(Those shelves, incidentally, were the idea of one of our volunteers, Laura B. from Helena.  Not only do they give the cats nice places to perch, making use of vertical space in the cat house, but the carpet on them is great for scratching and shredding, too.)

But as long as we’re in the cat house, Herbie is one loud cat, continually meowing at the top of his lungs.  The only time he stops is when we start petting him, and then he downshifts into a loud purr.  (Well, unless he’s inside the  cat food tub!)  He’s the kind of super-affectionate cat who would only be totally content if he were attached to you physically somehow.  It drives him crazy if he knows we’re there — oh so close! — but not paying attention to him.  And this is what he looks like then:

Yes, Herbie, I think we can hear you now.