Rolling Dog Farm Blog

A couple of hours after Dr. Joseph Harari left this afternoon (see previous post), I had just finished putting the horses up in their stalls at Beauty’s Barn when I walked over to see if I could help our new employee, Jodie B., wrap up at Lena’s Barn.  (Jodie and Gloria have both joined us in the past month, so we now have two full-time people helping us on animal care.)  Jodie was taking her last horse to his stall, but told me she had noticed our Belgian draft horse Beaver bleeding from his hoof when she was feeding him.

I had taken Joe and his friend over to meet the Belgians earlier and hadn’t seen anything wrong, so whatever it was had just happened.  Jodie and I headed over to look.  At this point it was 5:30 and getting dark.  Sure enough, he was bleeding from a puncture wound at the coronary band, just above the top of the hoof wall … and he had managed to peel off a layer of hoof, about an inch wide, all the way down to the bottom of his foot.  Just below the coronary band the hoof wall felt spongy.  Beaver boy!  If it were just a puncture wound, I wouldn’t be too concerned, but because of the location and because he’s got hoof wall injured, I’m worried.

I call our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, on her cell phone.  She knows my number and sees it on her caller ID.

Erin: "Dr. Smith."  (She calls me that. I love it.)

Me: "Another sighted horse finding new ways to injure itself."

She laughs.  The last time I was at her clinic I looked at their whiteboard with the list of horses currently there and pointedly noted how many of them were being treated for "lacerations" … and each of these horses, of course, could see.  It’s totally counterintuitive:  Why is it that sighted horses manage to cut themselves more often than blind horses?  But I digress.  Again. 

I explain to Erin what I’m seeing, and she tells me what to do.  Clean it up, bandage it, start him on antibiotics, get some bute (an anti-inflammatory) in him, and then call her in the morning when we have daylight to get a better look at it.

So that’s what I’m doing in the photo at the top of this post.  Jodie is holding Beaver, while his brother Rooster looks on.  We brought Rooster along to keep Beaver company — these two have to go everywhere together — and we kept him occupied with some grain in the bucket he has knocked over.  ("I’m done, so I think I’ll just kick this bucket to let them know.")

We’re using the mercury vapor light on the outside of Lena’s Barn to see, along with an LED headlamp I’m wearing.  Alayne came to help and also take these photos.

Here’s a shot of that huge foot … I’m spraying betadine, a disinfectant, on the wound:

I’m balancing Beaver’s foot on something called a HoofJack, a lightweight, amazingly strong hoof stand that our farrier introduced us to.  Of course, I still had to lift his foot onto the stand and "persuade" Beaver to keep it there, and after several rounds of lifting and holding his foot, my back was killing me.  I don’t know how farriers do this kind of work for a living!

Dr. Joseph Harari, our board-certified veterinary surgeon at Veterinary Surgical Specialists in Spokane, came out to the ranch today for a visit with a friend of his.  I took the photo this afternoon of Joe and Alayne with our recent arrival, Trooper.  Joe had examined Trooper last week, the morning after he arrived from a shelter in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Joe suggested today that we have Dr. Britt Culver, our internal medicine specialist in Helena, do the surgery on Trooper’s hip — it’s essentially a femoral head ostectomy, or FHO, which Britt has done before on a couple of our dogs.  Trooper’s hip joint has been obliterated from trauma at some point in the past, which also had broken his pelvis.  The FHO procedure will "clean up" the joint and make it easier for him to use that leg.  Once Trooper has healed from this procedure, Joe will proceed with the more complicated surgery on Trooper’s left front leg.

In this next photo Trooper is fascinated watching Spark, one of our barn cats, walk by the isolation yard.  You can see how that left front foot turns outward: 

Trooper, by the way, is no longer the shy, quiet fellow he pretended to be when he first arrived.  No, sir.  He’s become a happy, bouncing, jumping-with-joy character.  He’s also found his voice, and he sounds like … well, a hound dog.  To match those ears of his.

If it seems like there have been a lot of veterinary blog posts recently … well, it feels like that’s all I’ve been doing these past two weeks, taking animals to one of our vet clinics.  Today I took another full trailer-load to see Dr. Erin Taylor at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula. 

First up was Luna, our blind mare.  On Tuesday night, as I was
walking out to close up the barns about 10 p.m., I heard a lot of
choking and coughing coming from Beauty’s Barn.  I raced over and found
Luna choking in her stall.  I called Alayne, who was over at
Widget’s House letting the dogs out one last time before bed, and asked
her to come over to the barn as soon as she could.  Then I called
Erin, who was still up because of a colic case.  She directed me to
give Luna injections of acepromazine and banamine, monitor her for an
hour, and then call her back.  The drugs got Luna relaxed, the choking
stopped, and we finally went to bed.  On Wednesday she was fine.

But this morning, she was coughing a bit and had some yellow/greenish gunk
come up, so I decided it was time for Erin to look at her.  In the photo at the top of this post, Erin is looking through an endoscope into Luna’s trachea and esophagus.  Dr. Angela Langer is guiding the endoscope into Luna, while vet tech Courtney is holding Luna’s head.

Here’s another view of the same thing, taken a few minutes later:

There were no obstructions in Luna’s trachea or esophagus, although on her physical exam Erin noticed Luna’s neck was thickened.  She suspects that maybe some trauma was involved — Luna perhaps getting kicked by her pasture buddy blind Hannah.  These two girls do squabble from time to time, and the hooves sometimes fly.  If that happened on Tuesday and she got whacked in the neck, it might have predisposed her to choking.  For now we are going to treat Luna with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and keep a close eye on her.

Also in to see Erin were:

— Roy the old mule, who was in to get an appetite stimulant shot.  Roy isn’t eating enough, and will often still have grain and hay in his feeder the following morning after being in his stall all night.  There’s not another equine on the ranch who has any food left in their feeders the next day.  We are also going to be treating him for a presumed ulcer, and the medication for that (GastroGard) is arriving tomorrow.  That’s a 28-day course of daily treatment.  Roy is now officially the world’s most expensive old mule, although we love every dollar I mean every minute we have him.  Here’s Erin giving Roy the shot, while Courtney holds him:

— Domino, one of our blind Appaloosas, who was in for a penis/sheath exam.  He had been kicking at his belly a couple of days ago, and he didn’t have colic.  The last time this started happening we discovered he had a sheath infection, necrotic penile tissue, and maggots crawling around inside.  Egads.  Today we learned that he was starting to get red and inflamed again.  Erin thinks he isn’t dropping his penis enough when he pees, and he splashes urine around inside his sheath … which then causes urine scalding, damaged tissue, and the whole icky cycle.  So we have a special compounded cream to apply.  (Guess who gets to do that.)  To make sure I don’t get confused, Erin helpfully wrote on the lid of the jar, "For Domino’s P.P."  I decided you didn’t really need to see photos of the penis exam.  (You’re welcome.)

— Crazy Horse, our only sighted Appaloosa, an old boy who was in for a
lameness exam. He was, of course, much better today than the past two
days — it’s amazing what a trip to the doctor can do for you — so Erin and I chose not to give him another course of steroids
in his joints right now.  His last treatment was in October, and we only want to
use steroids when you really, really need to.

————–

And that was today.  On Friday, either Alayne or I will head to Helena to pick up blind Dusty and blind Babe, who I dropped off on Wednesday for eye work with Dr. Brenda Culver.

I drove over to our vet clinic in Helena, Montana Veterinary Specialists, this afternoon to pick up three animals we’d never seen before but had agreed to take last week.  In this photo I took at the clinic, vet tech Heather A. on the left is holding a blind cat that the Lewis & Clark Humane Society in Helena had asked if we could take.  Although the cat doesn’t look happy — he just had surgery yesterday to remove a painful, glaucoma eye — he in fact was purring up a storm. 

Vet tech Jayme J. is holding two Dachshunds (what? more Dachshunds?) who came from a bad situation here in Montana — a woman had more than 100 Dachshunds and Jack Russell Terriers at her place.  Yes, she was breeding, and clearly things had gotten way out of hand, as these backyard breeder situations often do.  Another lady had convinced her to start letting go of some of the dogs.  This lady was able to get 20 of the dogs out last week, and she called us when she realized that two of the Dachshunds had medical problems.

The clinic staff had named them Hairy and Smoothy, for obvious reasons, although Alayne had since decided to name them Oliver and Twist.  We often say that Widget claims to be a Beagle trapped in a Dachshund body, and Oliver would appear to be an Airedale trapped in a Dachshund body, too.  He’s one very long-haired guy … he’s got curls, too!  He has intervertebral disk disease, with weakness in his limbs.  He hops when he walks, although this is more from poor conformation than from an neurological problem.  You’ll see in this photo of Oliver kissing Jayme how his back legs go out:

Oliver also needed to be neutered.  Did someone mention "breeding"?

Twist’s left rear leg is his major problem.  In the photo at the top of the post, you can see how it juts straight out.  Our vets took X-rays yesterday and said it looks like his joints were "installed" backwards in that leg.  So when he walks, the leg is twisted (hence the name) outwards at an angle, stiff as a board.  Yet he doesn’t seem to be in any pain, and our vets didn’t think there was any need at this point to remove it.  He seems to get around fine with it.  Twist is also developing disk problems, and although his back is impossibly long, right now he is not showing any neurological damage. 

If Oliver’s a bold kisser, Twist is really shy.  I was trying to get a photo of him so you could see all of him, but the only thing he wanted to do was hide behind Heather’s legs:

And the cat … he needs a name!  The shelter had named him "Seer," but we’d like something different, so suggestions are welcome for this one, too.  (We’ve enjoyed all the suggestions for the three-legged girl and will make a decision next week on her name!)  Everyone at the clinic described him as just a sweet little lovebug.  As soon as I put my hands on him this afternoon, his purr engine roared to life.  (And he can’t feel very good anyway, having just had an eye removed yesterday.)

Here’s what he looked like in a photo the shelter director emailed me last week:

The left eye turned out to have very high internal pressure from glaucoma, and the pain meant it needed to come out.  Inside that socket on the right-hand side he does have an eyeball, but it is very small and not functional.  It doesn’t appear to be painful.

Here’s the final shot of the day, with Heather holding the-cat-who-needs-a-name:

I also brought blind Allie the Lab home tonight.  She had her eyes removed last week, but she is feeling a lot better than she has in a long time — she’s frisky and bouncy and has a real spark again.  So it was a full truck headed back to the ranch!

It’s not just Baron or Blanca who likes to sleep curled up with old uncle Dillon — just about everybody, sooner or later, snoozes alongside him.  Here’s blind Callie, finding a new way to enjoy him … not as a pillow, but more like a bed frame, while his stomach must feel like a built-in heating pad.  Dillon, bless his old heart, doesn’t seem to mind these opportunistic sleepers. 

We just learned that the TV program Animal Rescue this weekend ran a special edition featuring the winners of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Animal Action Awards.  The program is now online at this link.  The photo above is a screenshot I took this evening of the Web page with the clip featuring the ranch. 

There are a couple of steps to take before you’ll get to the video.

When you bring up the Web page from the link, a regular Animal Rescue TV show will start playing.  You’ll need to click on "Specials" in the bar under the screen.  Then you’ll see a thumbnail photo come up underneath that says "Animal Rescue — Special Edition."  (You can see it in the screenshot above — the group hug photo.)  Put your cursor over the photo and it will say "IFAW  Awards 2007."  Click on the photo and it will load the video in Flash.

The entire program is about 45 minutes.  The first segment is about The Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys.  Then the segment on the sanctuary starts about 9 minutes into the video and runs for about 5 minutes.  If you don’t want to sit through the first segment (although we would recommend it — they’re doing fascinating work with sea turtles), you can simply mute it and let the Flash video play in the background for a while.  Because it’s Flash, once the program has been running for a while, you can always grab the slider control and fast forward or rewind to the start of the piece on the ranch.

The camera crew filmed the episode on us back in July, when it was hot and very smoky from the forest fires here in the northern Rockies.  So that’s what all the haze is you’ll see in the video.

Happy viewing!

Finally, here are photos of the two three-legged cats we picked up at Spokane County’s animal shelter last week.  Alayne took these photos of me with them this afternoon outside our isolation cottage.  For a rash, fleeting moment, I pondered the idea of trying to hold both of them together for the same photo, one in each arm.  But then my 20+ years of cat experience, now hardwired into my brain, suggested that this was probably not a good idea.  (Although that might have made for some great blog photos.)

Ironically, as it turns out, both cats are missing the same leg — the left front, although the gray one has a stump of a leg still left.

The tortie, named Honey Girl, was found as a stray by an animal control officer back in October.  The cat had a mangled leg, and the shelter took her to a veterinarian to have the limb amputated.  Although this cat is just as sweet as can be and loves people, no one was interested in adopting her.  Hence the call to us. 

The gray one, also a female, had been hanging around a school for five weeks. The students and staff had taken to feeding her, and eventually an animal control officer took her to the shelter.  This cat is sweet, too, but isn’t quite as outgoing yet as Honey Girl.  Honey Girl is the kind of gal who would come right out and ask a boy to dance.  The gray one would wait to be asked.

In this photo, it looks like she’s missing the right front leg, but she has her right foot pulled down and tucked underneath my arm.  That’s the stump of her left leg you see hanging over my hand.

You can see there are a lot of similarities with these two — they both came from the same shelter, both are females, both are missing the same limb, both are very nice girls, and both arrived at the same time.  But the gray one doesn’t have a name, and thus suggestions are welcome!  (But no "Tripod," please.) 

There’s something else about the gray one that may be different, too.  The shelter thinks she may be …  pregnant.  Oh, no!  Yep.  She sure feels round in the middle, so we’ll be taking her in for an ultrasound.  We’re just hoping the schoolkids were feeding her too much!

(Click on photos for larger image.)

 

This morning I drove a full trailer-load — three blind horses and one mule — to our equine vet clinic in Missoula, Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital.  Two of the horses, Rocky and Shasta, needed surgery to remove painful eyes.  The third blind horse, recent arrival Bo, needed dental work.  And the mule, our lovable old Roy, needed his arthritic joints injected again with steroids.  (He does not play in Major League Baseball so this is okay.)

In the photo above, Shasta has been anesthetized and we’ve lifted him up off the ground with the ceiling-mounted hoist.  Our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, is in the back in the green shirt; with her are vet techs Tiffany on the left, Courtney in the center and Amanda on the right, holding the controls for the hoist.

In this next shot they’ve raised the hydraulic surgery table that sits in the floor.  Once the operation is over, they lower the table, with the horse still on it, back into the floor.  Thus the horse is lying on the ground when he starts waking up from anesthesia:

Here Shasta is being lowered onto the table.  Erin and team are pulling him back towards them so he’s square on the table.  (Notice I’m not helping, just taking photos.)  We’ve already added the head rest, and next will come the leg rests:

Now Erin is clipping the area around the eye she’s going to remove, while Courtney is setting up the equipment to monitor his vital signs during the surgery:

And then Erin starts her surgery.  Before I knew it, she was finished, the operating table was retracted into the floor, and Shasta was starting to wake up.  I think the entire process took roughly 30 minutes or so:

If that was the main event — Erin will do Rocky’s eye surgery tomorrow — these next photos show what else went on.  Another of the vets at the clinic, Dr. Doug Reedy, stepped in to float Bo’s teeth.  One of the things we really like about this clinic is that there are five vets on staff, so whatever needs to get done will get done.  Thus Doug took care of Bo while Erin worked on Roy.  And Bo needed serious dental work, that’s for sure.  It had been a long time, if ever, since he had any dental care.  Doug said Bo had hooks on his teeth that were among the worst he’d seen:

We had last injected Roy’s stiff, arthritic joints back in August, and he was due to get some more steroids in him.  It made a remarkable difference for him the first time, and we’re delighted the treatment lasted as long as it did. So here’s Erin injecting his hock. Yes, that mule does have a head, it’s just out of view!

Ironically, long before we had agreed to take Trooper from the Shreveport shelter, we had earlier agreed to take a three-legged Rottie named Boudreaux.  He had been turned into the same shelter.  Because Boudreaux was also too big to fly out of Shreveport, we were going to fly him out of Dallas as well, on the same flight we ended up putting Trooper on.  About two weeks ago, in preparation for his trip, the rescue group we were working with in Shreveport had arranged for Boudreaux to go to a foster home in Dallas.

The foster, Kapi N., volunteers for Southern States Rescued Rottweilers, and has two Rotties of her own.  In earlier phone calls after Boudreaux arrived at her home, Kapi told us what a wonderful dog he was.  Kapi and I both thought that Boudreaux was too complicated a name, and we realized that each of us — independently and unknown to each other — had already started referring to him as "Buddy."

With Buddy’s flight scheduled for Monday, Kapi called on Saturday morning to say she had fallen in love with him, as had the rest of the family.  He was a gentle giant, very sweet, and he got along great with her other dogs and the family cats, too — as you can see from the photo above that she sent.  Kapi said Buddy was a special boy and she wanted to know if she could adopt him! 

Of course, we said — you bet!  We try to save our very limited room for animals who have no other options, and this was a perfect home for Buddy.  So we were delighted to let Buddy stay with his new Mom in Dallas.  Thus on Monday, only one dog got on the flight, and that was Trooper … who really needed to come here.

This is Trooper, a very sweet Lab/Hound mix who just arrived last night from a shelter in Shreveport, Louisiana.  One look at his front legs and you can see this is a boy who needs medical attention.  Rebecca Y., who’s with a rescue group called Animal Rescue, Inc., in Shreveport, emailed us on Thanksgiving Day to ask if we could take Trooper.  He had just been dumped by his owners at a local shelter.  After looking at the photos Rebecca sent, I emailed her back Thanksgiving evening and said we’d take him.

It took a while to work out the transportation logistics.  He was too big to fly out of Shreveport or fly into Missoula, because those airports use the small regional jets that limit crates to the "large" size … which is about big enough for a Cocker Spaniel.  They won’t take extra-large or giant kennels, which means we had to find airline routes using bigger jets flying into airports as close to us as possible.  That turned out to be a Northwest flight from Dallas to Minneapolis and then on to Spokane, Washington, and we booked his flight for yesterday.  I had earlier called a pet store in Shreveport and purchased a crate that Rebecca could use for Trooper.

Rebecca found a volunteer who kindly drove Trooper to Dallas to catch his outbound flight.  Once I confirmed he was at DFW, we got in the truck and started the four-hour drive to Spokane.  With me was Gloria G., who started working here at the ranch a few weeks ago.  Trooper’s flight didn’t arrive last night until 10:40 p.m. in Spokane, but by the time the airplane was unloaded and he was brought over to the cargo area, it was after midnight.  It was bitterly cold — 13 degrees with an ice fog, and snow on the ground.  For a while we were worried that the plane wouldn’t be able to land, but fortunately it did. 

We were shocked at how skinny Trooper was.  His ribs were sticking out, and his hip bones jutted out, too.  We noticed his right rear leg was atrophied and he often held it up in the air, although occasionally he’d put it down on the ground.  Here’s what he looked like from the top:

I had already scheduled an appointment with one of our board-certified veterinary surgeons in Spokane, Dr. Joseph Harari, to see Trooper this morning.  So after a few hours of sleep in a Spokane hotel, Gloria and I arrived at the clinic with Trooper at 8 a.m.  Here is Joe doing a physical exam on him:

Next came X-rays, and because the clinic has a digital X-ray system, we were looking at the radiographs in less than 5 minutes.  They told the full story about Trooper’s condition.  This is the view of his front left leg:

In simplest terms, two bones in his leg — the radius and ulna — never grew at a normal rate.  The ulna, in fact, stopped growing … and this "blocked" the radius from growing normally.  The radius continued to try to grow, but had nowhere to go and ended up curving out in a ‘bowstring’ effect.  Trooper’s right foot does this, too, but to a much smaller extent.

Trooper’s right hip was a disaster, as you can see from this X-ray.  (His right hip is on the left side of this image as you look at it … you may need to click on the image to enlarge it.)  Not only did he have a broken pelvis at one point, but the head of his femur — the "ball" that goes in the hip socket — was obliterated:

Joe said Trooper’s hip damage was from trauma of some sort … but what we don’t know.  This poor dog has suffered from a birth defect at the front end and from trauma at the back end.

So Trooper needs at least two rounds of surgery — one to fix his front leg, and another to clean out his hip joint.  The front leg surgery is the major one and will require rods and pins, two months of intensive nursing after the operation, and weekly trips to Spokane during those two months for the surgeons to check on the leg’s progress.  Joe is going to write up the surgery procedures, costs and post-op treatment plans to send me so we’ll have a very good idea of what we’re looking at.  But in the meantime, Joe doesn’t want to do any surgery on Trooper until we get some groceries in him!  Given his current physical condition, he doesn’t think Trooper is a good candidate for surgery. 

After we left the clinic, we stopped at the Spokane County shelter to pick up not one but two three-legged cats the staff had called us about.  More on those two in a future post!

Gloria and I arrived back at the ranch this evening with Trooper and cats in tow.  Although we haven’t had a chance to get to know the cats yet, I will tell you that Trooper is one of the nicest, sweetest dogs we’ve ever seen.  We have already fallen in love with him … as did the clinic staff.  He is really quite something.

It cost $644.20 to fly Trooper out, $179 for his giant crate, and $323 for his first vet exam today … and clearly we have a lot more to go on this boy.  But thanks to the sanctuary’s supporters, Trooper is going to get all the medical care he needs.  Yes, it will be expensive — but he’s very much worth it.  As for the love he’s already getting — well, that’s free!

(Click on photos for larger image.)