Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Late yesterday afternoon Jodie called from the welcome center to say she and Gloria had just found blind Nikki suddenly acting like Copper Kid, our neurologically impaired "wobbler" horse.  What?!?  I was on a videoconference with Alison, our development director in Helena, so I hurriedly signed off, suited up and raced out.  Nikki was still in the corral, standing stiffly.  I asked Gloria to help move her while I stood back to watch, but it was clear Nikki didn’t want to move.  We finally got her going, and I was stunned to see our beloved little 4-year old filly dragging her hooves, swaying, and looking like she had no idea where her feet were.  We pushed on her to go back, but she planted her rear feet widely and wouldn’t budge.  Oh, no.

My first thought was that she indeed looked and acted like a wobbler.  Copper Kid was three when he developed his symptoms.  Could we really end up with two wobblers?

I called our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, from the corral.  Being a wise sort, she immediately realized I needed more "treatment" than Nikki did at the moment, and proceeded to explain why it was very unlikely Nikki was a wobbler.  Generally wobblers start showing their symptoms gradually and then progressively become worse with time.  Just the day before, Nikki had been bucking and kicking and racing around the corral.  So it would have been unusual — to say the least — that she could have become a wobbler in 24 hours. 

Instead, the wise doctor suggested, it was more likely Nikki had suffered some kind of trauma that interfered with her nervous system.  Yet there were no bent corral panels, no marks or swelling on Nikki, and nothing else I could see to indicate any injury.  But Erin walked me through the possibilities.  As an example, she mentioned the brachial plexus, an area near the shoulder where a network of major nerves comes together.  Erin said that if Nikki had slipped and done "the splits" with her front legs, or just slipped and shot her leg out at an awkward angle, this could have damaged the brachial plexus … and that could explain a good part of what we were seeing.  And if Nikki had fallen in the process and tweaked her spine, this could affect the nerves running to her hind legs and thus explain the ataxia we were seeing there.

In a snow-covered corral with a frisky blind filly acting like a bucking bronc, that kind of major wipeout could well be possible!

This graphic shows the brachial plexus … all those yellow lines are the nerves:

Nikki was too unstable to transport to the hospital last night, so Erin told me to go ahead and do the same two things she would do anyway: inject Nikki with a whopping IV dose of dexamethasone (steroids) and an IV dose of banamine, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, and see how she was in the morning.  Gloria and Jodie gently moved Nikki out of the corral and into her stall in Lena’s Barn while I went to the house to get the drugs and load the syringes.  I gave Nikki the injections, called Erin to report in, and she asked me to call her again about 9 p.m. with an update. 

Erin’s colleague, Dr. Angela Langer, was already scheduled to come out to the ranch this afternoon, so we knew Angela would be able to do an exam when she arrived today. 

By this morning Nikki was walking in her stall — that was an improvement! — but still dragging her feet some and looking unsure in her movements.  Erin had me give her another round of the dex and banamine, and then wait for Angela’s assessment.

And that’s what you see in the photo at the top of this post … Angela is examining Nikki outside Lena’s Barn.  Angela’s mom, Anne C. who is visiting from California, is holding Nikki for her.  By this afternoon, Nikki had dramatically improved … I couldn’t believe the difference when I walked her out of the stall for Angela to examine.  Angela concluded that Nikki likely had suffered the very scenario Erin had described, and that we should continue with the current treatment, but begin tapering off the doses.  Needless to say, we were much relieved by Nikki’s progress and the diagnosis!

Here’s another shot of Angela, Anne and our prize filly after the exam:

Today the UPS guy dropped off a big box of toys sent by a wonderful sanctuary supporter in Florida, and before you could say "soft squeaky toy," Miss Cardboard Shredder went to work.  As I have reported before, blind Goldie is just a wee bit OCD about soft squeaky toys, or SSTs.  Her SST rules-to-live-by include:  1) One is never enough; 2) Where there’s one there must be two; and 3) Where there are two, there must be even more!

So first she chewed a hole in the top corner, and then began fishing around inside.  Goldie never really destroys the box, preferring instead to make neat holes just big enough for the purpose at hand.  In this case, big enough to get her head inside … barely.  You can tell from the photo above she already took a brief time-out to momentarily defluff one toy, but then dove back into the box.  Here she is, waiting to see if we’d let her keep going:

Goldie’s back is shaved because she had surgery last week to remove a cancerous growth from over her ribcage.  The biopsy results came back on Saturday and showed good, clean margins around the tissue, so we know we got it all.  There will be many more boxes to shred in her future!

I was coming back from Beauty’s Barn this evening just after 5 p.m. and saw the dogs gathered on the front porch of Widget’s House.  Jodie had just gone over to let them out again before feeding them.  It was already 10 below zero and the sun was barely below the horizon; that’s Ovando Mountain in the background, still capturing some light from the setting sun.  You can tell from the gathering on the porch that the dogs do not want to go outside and go potty.  No, sir. 

I reported on the blog yesterday evening that our forecast low for last night was minus 11.  Well, it was actually minus 30 when we got up this morning.  (For our international readers, that’s minus 34 Celsius.)  This is what our back porch thermometer was showing just before I headed out to start taking care of the horses:

To double-check, I went out and looked at the thermometer in the wood shed, and this is what I found:

Our really sophisticated wireless weather station, an expensive LaCrosse Technology unit that measures wind speed and lots of other conditions, goes offline at 20 below zero … now isn’t that helpful?  So when it gets this cold, we rely on the $10 thermometers to know what the temperature really is.

When I returned from barn chores two hours later, it had warmed up to a brisk 18 below zero (-27 C) in the sun.

As I sat down to write this post about 5:30 p.m., it had already dropped another 5 degrees to 15 below … but the National Weather Service office in Missoula had a forecast calling for a low of minus 19 for tonight.  So I just called the office (we’re "official weather spotters" for the NWS) to let them know we were going to blow past minus 19 in a matter of minutes.  They want that kind of feedback so they can update their forecasts accordingly.  And sure enough, at 5:53 p.m., we just hit 20 below.  It drops that fast after the sun sets out here.

We had an Arctic front sweep in late yesterday, delivering a blizzard overnight and then sub-zero temperatures today — with snowdrifts everywhere.  Sub-zero for us is fairly routine and our horses are used to it, but we continued to have wind throughout the day … and that’s a problem for the horses when it’s this cold.  Some of our horses are blanketed all winter long, but others aren’t unless the weather turns like this.  Alayne took the photo of me putting a blanket on blind Guadalupe today. 

As I write this at 8 p.m., it’s 5 below zero and the wind is blowing 10 miles an hour.  Brrr.

Who we blanket and when depends on a lot of variables:  Body condition, age, quality of winter coat, type of shelter (run-in vs. barn stall), individual tolerance for cold, and of course, the weather itself.

And we’re in for a sustained cold spell.  Here’s the National Weather Service forecast this evening for our location for the next few days:

—

Tonight: A 40 percent chance of snow, mainly before 11pm. Mostly
cloudy, with a low around -11. East northeast wind between 11 and 15
mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. Little or no snow accumulation
expected.

M.L.King Day: Mostly sunny and cold, with a
high near 6. East northeast wind between 10 and 13 mph becoming light.
Winds could gust as high as 20 mph.

Monday Night: Patchy freezing fog. Mostly clear, with a low around -19. Northeast wind around 5 mph becoming calm.

Tuesday: Patchy freezing fog. Mostly sunny and cold, with a high near 1. Calm wind becoming west between 4 and 7  mph.

Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around -16. West wind between 4 and 7 mph becoming calm.

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As you can imagine, getting the dogs to stay outside long enough in this kind of weather to do their business is always a challenge!  At least we don’t have that problem with the horses!

In the background of the photo above is Beauty’s Barn on the left and our new hay barn on the right.  If that building looks big, it’s because it is a whopper — 100 feet long and 32 feet wide with 20-foot high walls. Just what you need to store more than 100 tons of hay!  Having that hay barn has saved us an immense amount of time and effort this winter.  Before we built it, we stored our hay in a neighbor’s barn almost a mile away, which meant we had to load at least 2 tons of hay on our flatbed trailer every week, drive it back to the ranch, unload and stack it at the various horse barns.  Honestly, we didn’t need the exercise!

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Update on Snowball and Popeye:  Dr. Jennifer Rockwell at Montana Veterinary Specialists called this weekend to say that although she drained more fluid from Snowball’s chest, he is perking up and has begun eating again … and that is great news.  Popeye continues to make progress with his eye, and Dr. Brenda Culver plans to do a follow-up procedure to close his eye socket again this week.

That’s our deaf cat Snowball, shown in better times.  He had come to us a few years ago from a ghastly animal hoarder case, the conditions of which had made him chronically sick.  Ever since he arrived we have treated him for stomatitis, an oral inflammation disease that is very difficult to overcome.  He’s been on steroids, had his teeth removed, and yet his stomatitis would continue to flare up from time to time, leaving his gums bloody and painful.  When this happened, he wouldn’t eat and he’d stop grooming himself because his mouth hurt.  Our vets in Helena at Montana Veterinary Specialists came up with a special stomatitis drug "cocktail" to help treat this disease, and although it helped, he would still have relapses.  It didn’t help that his immune system was suppressed.  This left him vulnerable to every bug the other cats might bring into the cat house; things that would be sub-clinical in them would make him sick.

A couple of months ago he spent a week at the vet clinic after a particularly bad stomatitis flare-up.  Even then, our vet Brenda Culver said Snowball would stick his paw out of the cage to try and tap people on the head as they walked by.  And through all his problems — when he looked awful and felt awful — he continued to be a loving, purring, affectionate guy.  When I’d walk into the cat house, he’d look at me and meow.  This meant, "Thanks for showing up, now please feed me."  Because he was missing all his teeth he ate canned food, so Snowball ate his meals in one of our medical cages to keep the other cats away.

A few weeks ago he started to go downhill again, while he was on the stomatitis cocktail.  Frustrated, I had called Brenda to ask what else we could do.  She said, "You don’t want to contemplate the alternative."  We had discussed his quality of life many times, but we had always concluded that in the face of his enjoyment of eating, his affectionate ways, and his purring, that he still had a reasonably good quality of life. 

But he continued to deteriorate, and he looked terrible.  Alayne and I, as well as Jodie, talked about whether the time had come to let him go.  Then last week, Snowball developed an upper respiratory infection, so I moved him to the isolation cottage and started treating him for that.  (In a cat with a suppressed immune system, a simple URI can become deadly.)  He hated the oral medication, Amoxicillin, and he was an ace at foaming up and then spitting out the pink fluid.  Snowball’s face would be more pink than white after I finished dosing him. 

Last weekend he stopped eating, and he became dehydrated.  Even after I got the URI under control, he didn’t resume eating.  I added fish oil to his food but he wasn’t tempted.  I left the food out with him all night, and the next morning, the dish would be sitting there, untouched. 

Was he telling us he was ready to go?

If you looked him, you would think so.  He seemed miserable.

On Tuesday afternoon, I had finished giving him his medications and stayed to love him up.  I figured by then that this would be his last week, and I wanted him to remember me as the guy who loved him, not as the guy who kept squirting medications down his throat.  He had been morose, but as I scratched him, he quietly started to purr … and the little rumblings soon began to sound like an engine roaring to life.  Then he arched his body, his way of telling me to scratch his back.  I was leaning over him, scratching away, when he turned and reached forward to rub his head on my hat brim.

My heart stopped.  I thought, this is not a cat who wants to die.

I called Brenda that evening and told her what was going on with Snowball, how he had continued to get worse, how he had stopped eating, and how we had been thinking it was time to euthanize him.  But, I told her, "He’s still purring!  How can we give up if he’s doing that?"  I told her I was just worried that there might be something else going on with him … maybe it wasn’t his immune system, it wasn’t the stomatitis, maybe he was dealing with something we didn’t know about.

Too often we have treated an animal for one chronic disease, only to have them die of something totally different that we had never diagnosed … because the original disease masked the symptoms of the later disease.  For example, my most favorite cat in the world, Hoedad — one I brought back to the U.S. from Sri Lanka many years ago — had chronic renal disease, which we treated for a couple of years.  But he died, unexpectedly, of lymphoma.  We never knew he had it until the very end.  That has happened to us so often, and yet we sometimes forget.

And even if there wasn’t another disease at work, I wanted to give Snowball one last chance.  We’d hook him up to IVs, Brenda was going to try an experimental viral drug, and we’d see if we could help him turn the corner.  If not, at least we know we had tried everything.  So that’s why I took Snowball into the clinic yesterday morning.  It was going to be our last effort.

When Brenda called late yesterday with her initial report, I almost wanted to cry.  Brenda said her husband, Britt Culver, our board-certified internal medicine specialist at the clinic, had found fluid in Snowball’s chest.  That led him to do an echocardiogram of Snowball’s heart.  He found Snowball was suffering from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, in which the walls of the heart muscle become thickened and enlarged. 

That would explain why he felt and looked so bad, and why he had stopped eating.  Britt told me tonight that many congestive heart failure patients become anorexic. 

Now, ordinarily, this would be a devastating diagnosis to get.  But considering that cardiomyopathy is treatable in the short-term with heart medications — Britt has started Snowball on diuretics and beta-blockers   — and considering that we were contemplating euthanasia, this was like someone tossing us a lifeline at the last possible moment.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no false hope here.  Snowball’s prognosis is not good … already having fluid in his chest is a poor indicator.  But at least we know what we’re dealing with now, and we have a chance to make him feel better again — at least for a while.  We’ll know in another 48 to 72 hours how well the heart medications are helping him.

The lesson we learned … again … is that in the face of chronic disease and a sudden downturn, we should always ask, "What else could be going on?"

Our goal now is to get Snowball to see another Rocky Mountain spring, so he can sit in the open window and soak in the sunshine and feel a warm breeze.  Will he make it?  I don’t know.  But at least we have a better chance today than we did two days ago.

This is another in our continuing series called "mismatched dogs and beds."  For some reason, we find the big dogs like sleeping on small beds, while the small dogs have taken over the big beds.  Although it’s easy to understand why the small ones want the big beds, what is it about being squashed into a small bed that appeals to big dogs?  For example, that’s blind-and-deaf Spinner in the photo above, who seemed to be enjoying herself while parked (perched?) on top of a teeny little dog bed.  I’m not sure what the purpose was, with dog butt hanging off one end and front legs stuck out the other end, but it was working just fine for her.

The black tub next to Spinner is our dog water bowl — originally designed to hold horse salt blocks, but perfect for the multi-dog household.  And speaking of dogs, please note the nicely chewed leg on the rocking chair.  With Kongs, squeaky toys and chew ropes scattered around, there’s still nothing quite like a nice piece of furniture to gnaw on.  As the MasterCard commercials say: "Priceless!"

—

I had to take Snowball our deaf cat to the vet clinic in Helena this morning.  He’s had chronic stomatitis — an oral inflammation — and a suppressed immune system, requiring lots of daily medications and other care.  He’s been going downhill in the past several days.  More on Snowball in tomorrow’s post.  But I was able to pick up Smoke the barn cat and bring him back to the ranch.  It turns out he had a very small puncture wound of some sort … so small they had to shave his arm to find it … and even though it had scabbed up, there was an infection brewing in his leg.  He’s on antibiotics and cage rest for the next few days.

That’s Oliver and Twist, the new Dachshund arrivals, enjoying some snuggle time together.  These two guys are closely bonded with each other, and it’s really cute to see how often they’re looking to see where the other one is.  Once out of quarantine, they moved right in — they may not have had much human contact in their previous life, but that didn’t stop them from making themselves at home.

When we let them out of the isolation cottage and brought them to the house, we opened the back door and they scurried in.  Well, Oliver (the tan one) actually hopped in and Twist — despite the rear leg that sticks out — zoomed in.  When he wants to move fast, he just lifts that leg up and gets it out of the way.  But he does use it when he wants to turn, and he will put weight on it when standing still.  These two characters bring the Dachshund pack now up to seven.

And if you thought they were adorable in that photo, here’s another one I took a few moments later:

Dachshund togetherness, huh?

This weekend we found Smoke, one of our barn cats who lives in Lena’s Barn, limping on a front leg and acting like he hurt.  I gathered him up and took him to the cat house.  Typically our barn cats do not … repeat do not … like being confined, but Smoke didn’t protest when I put him in a medical cage for 24 hours of cage rest and gave him a painkiller.  The leg wasn’t really swollen and didn’t appear to be broken … more like a sprain, I thought.  But this morning he still didn’t want to use it, so I put him in the truck and headed to our vet clinic in Helena.  Alayne took the photo of Smoke and me just before we left. 

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but Smoke has dazzling blue eyes and a beautiful Siamese-like coat.  He is, in a phrase, drop-dead handsome.  But he’s the first to tell you, "I’m not a Siamese, I’m a Montanan!"

When I got to the clinic after the 70-mile drive and let him out of the crate, he marched across the floor with no limp at all.  And bearing weight on that leg, too.  "Well, of course!," I thought to myself.  Sometimes it seems all you have to do is haul an animal to the vet clinic and — it’s a miracle! — they’ll be fine when you arrive.  I call this their "show-me-you-still-love-me" test .. they just want to know if we still care enough to make the effort to drive all that way. "Oh, I’m fine, thanks, just wanted to double-check.  You passed."

But I could just see bringing the little devil all the way back to the ranch, letting him out of the crate, and then watching him limp away back to the barn.  So I left him at the clinic for one of the doctors to examine.

—

I had planned to pick up Popeye today — the operation to remove his eye had gone well last week — but over the weekend he had developed discharges from the surgery site and the sutured eyelids had started to come open.  So our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was trying to determine what had happened and obviously wanted him to remain at the clinic while she treated him for this new problem.

—

In the background of the photo is Widget’s House, our main dog building, with all the snow on the roof.  The trees are all frosty because we had an ice fog overnight and it coated everything in beautiful white crystals.  It was one below zero this morning when I headed out to do barn chores, but fortunately the fog had lifted.  It’s one above zero this evening, as I write this at 8:30 p.m.  In case you’re wondering how our barn cats do in this kind of weather, Smoke and his two sisters, Smudge and Skitter, have a heated dog igloo  in Lena’s Barn and a heated water bowl.  At Beauty’s Barn, the two cats there — Joshua and Rocky — live in the medical room, which is heated to 60 degrees.  It’s not exactly your typical barn cat life!

Remember the blind cat from the Helena shelter we picked up the same day that the Dachshunds Oliver and Twist came?  Well, we named him Herbie — a suggestion from one of our regular blog readers, Andrew in New Zealand.  I had mentioned that this little yellow cat was a real "lovebug" — and that brought to mind Herbie the VW bug from the 1960s movie of the same name.  Needless to say, you need to be of a … um, certain age to remember that film, and unfortunately I am. 

(However … having just said that … in searching for a link to the movie to insert in this post, I just discovered that Lindsay Lohan did a Herbie flick in 2005.  Somehow we missed that one.  Did they actually let her get behind the wheel?)

So this morning in the cat house, Jodie was helping hold Herbie while I took the sutures out from his eye surgery.  I had the camera with me, and after we got done removing sutures, I took these photos of Herbie and three-legged Honey Girl.

Our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, and I had wondered how much vision Herbie had in his remaining left eye, which is shrunken and deep in the socket.  After watching him in the cat house and doing various vision tests, the answer is:  None.  I can stand right in front of Herbie and he can’t see me.  He’ll reach out with his paw, trying to find me, waving it back and forth in the air. 

But that doesn’t mean this affectionate tabby doesn’t like to climb up on the shelves in the cat house!  He’ll go all the way up to the one Honey Girl is sitting on.  He knew Honey Girl was right above him … she was purring up a storm, and I had been petting her a moment earlier.  Thus here he is reaching up to see if he can find her:

And here she is, reaching down as if she were going to give him a kiss:

Wrong!  She was only lining up to swat him, and she did!  Bad Honey Girl!  I was so focused on capturing the angelic scene that I missed getting the swat on camera, it happened so fast.  But I did get the moment after the swat in this next photo … note Herbie’s body language … poor guy!  And notice Miss Scamp’s right front paw there, just pulled back after the strike.  (No animals were injured in the making of these photos.)  I think she just wanted to play, but when you’re blind, it’s a little hard to tell!

Here’s an online contest that  could bring in a lot of money for the animals at the ranch!

Sanctuary supporter Kim Taylor just informed us that her dog, Summitt, has been selected as a finalist for the mascot of Firedog, Circuit City’s technology support service.  The great news for us is that if Summitt wins the contest, for every vote she receives, Circuit City and Kodak will donate $1 to the animal sanctuary of Kim’s choice — the Rolling Dog Ranch!       

The sanctuary could receive up to $100,000 AND if Summitt wins the Grand Prize, an additional $50,000!  Please help the Rolling Dog Ranch and Summitt in this fun way to support the sanctuary.       

You can vote for Summitt on the Firedog website — look for the wonderful photo of Summitt swimming, shown above.  Follow the instructions carefully — once you vote, you’ll receive a confirmation email and you will need to click on a link in the email to verify your vote.

If you don’t get the email — it will say "firedog photo contest" in the ‘From’ line — then check your spam filter or junk mail folder.  It’s not unusual for these Web site-generated emails to be flagged as spam.

Please note that we are not involved in running the contest and that the voting takes place on the Circuit City Firedog Web site, so we cannot help with any technical issues with the Web site or the voting process.  Although having cast my own vote today, I can tell you it’s very quick and simple!

Please also let your friends and family know about the contest.  You can help Summitt and the Rolling Dog Ranch win big!  Cast your vote for Summitt here.

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Update on Popeye the cat:  Dr. Brenda Culver called this evening to say Popeye’s surgery to remove his eye went fine, and he recovered easily from the anesthesia.  Because we don’t know what caused Popeye’s initial eye problems when he was a kitten, Brenda is sending the eye to a veterinary pathologist at the University of Wisconsin’s College of Veterinary Medicine.  This veterinarian specializes in ocular pathology and is an internationally recognized expert in this field, so if anyone can tell us what happened to Popeye’s eyes, he’s the person.  This is more than an academic interest on our part, because if we know what type of virus or disease affected his eyes initially, we will have a better idea of what to expect might happen with his remaining eye … and if we can do anything about it in the meantime.  It will take a few weeks to get the results.