Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I was feeding the dogs at Widget’s House yesterday evening when I looked across the room and deaf Tyler doing his pathetic routine.  He is one of the original ‘drama queens’ at the ranch … a dog who can look tragic in an instant, simply to get you to envelop him in your arms out of sympathy.  (Clever, eh?)  He also can appear thoroughly conflicted — so he’ll have his tail tucked between his legs and a haunted look on his face, like he’s scared to death of you.  But when you drop to your knees and open your arms wide, he’ll run right to you … with his tail still tightly tucked. 

A minute later he’s running around, tail up, being goofy.  Then he’s back to interminable sadness, as if the weight of the world is on his Pointer shoulders.  I tell him he really does not need to worry about the Dow plunging 237 points, Pakistan unraveling or global warming.  But fret he does … until absolute joy overtakes him.  We never quite know what he’s thinking.  As Alayne likes to say, "Tyler lives in Tyler’s own little world." 

And what you see in the photo is what he does at dinnertime on occasion … sitting hunched over in the middle of the room, looking and acting pathetic, hoping to get fed before anyone else does.  No, it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t keep him from trying!

I took this photo of blind Emmy Lou late this afternoon when I was at Widget’s House, our main dog building.  I didn’t have a particular subject in mind when I headed over with the camera, but Emmy Lou clearly had herself in mind.  She would not leave me alone.  She followed me all over the yard, and when I would stop walking, she’d stop.  I’d take a few steps back to get a better shot of her, she’d move right toward me.  My biggest problem was just keeping her far enough away … say, two feet! … that I could frame a shot.

Her hearing is not good — she can’t tell which direction sound is coming from — but if she gets close to you, she’ll use her sense of smell and what hearing she does have to stay near you.  So I just kept shooting away as she kept posing for me, and ended up with that unique shot above.

Here’s another view of her:

At one point blind Dusty walked by, which got Emmy Lou’s interest.  So she bounded off after him, and when I say "bound," that’s what I mean.  She moves more like a deer than a dog, leaping with rear-end up in the air.  Here’s what that looked like:

Once she realized Dusty was not going to play with her, she turned around to come find me again.  Apparently she thought I needed to take some more photos of her.

(Click on photos for larger image.)

I took this photo late this afternoon, as Alayne and I were finishing up barn chores on a beautiful if brisk Thanksgiving Day.  The view is to the northeast, and the peaks you see are in the Scapegoat Wilderness, part of the enormous Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.  As the sun was dropping, so too was the temperature.  By the time we got indoors, it was already just three degrees above zero and headed lower.   

It took a few hours to get all the horses fed and into their stalls for the night.  Then Alayne fed the "cottage dogs" (the 20 who live with us or in the cottages next to our house) while I went over to feed the 20 dogs at Widget’s House.  With everyone fed, Alayne and I were able to finally start on our dinner — the Thanksgiving Day feast! — about 5 p.m. 

At some point this evening the temperature dipped below zero, but as I write this it’s crept back up to 7 above zero, thanks to some cloud cover that rolled in.  I had already split the wood for the evening’s fire, and the woodstove is keeping us plenty warm in here.

And now that it’s 9 p.m., it’s time to head outside again — to let the dogs out for the final pit stop, then put them up for the night.  Once the dogs are done, I check in on the horses at each of the three barns and make sure everything’s okay.  On a night as cold as this one, everyone’s very happy to be tucked away indoors!

Cassie B. of Hamilton, Montana, who adopted our little blind dog Nevada a couple of months ago, emailed us the above photo of her yesterday, enjoying the same snow we got.  Cassie and her husband Brent renamed Nevada as Bindi, which I sometimes roll together now as "Nevindi."  Here’s how Cassie described the scene yesterday morning:

"Of course, this was Bindi’s first experience with snow (that we know of, right?), and it was hysterical to watch.  She tried to eat all of it when she first stepped out into it, until she realized there was just too much there to consume in one sitting, so she decided to go exploring.  She hit the back yard and just started tearing through all the snow in huge, joyful circles.  Then she put her head down and started plowing & tunneling.  I thought that kind of enthusiasm for snow was just a lab thing, but apparently little blind mutts enjoy it equally as much.  I am attaching a photo of Bindi in all of her winter glory."

Photo credit goes to Brent for that shot!

Yesterday evening, just as we were winding up barn chores, the rain of the past two days turned to snow.  And it snowed.  And snowed.  We woke up today to about 8 inches, and it continued throughout the day.  By tonight we probably had about 12 inches of snow. 

I took the photo above of little Smokey, one of the two wobbly brothers who arrived from Ohio back in October.  This was their first snow ever, and they loved jumping through it.  What I think they loved the most about the snow, however, was that it gave them something soft to land on when they fall!

Smokey, like all of our wobblers — dogs and cats — has a knack for doing what I call a ‘body block.’  They walk straight for you (straight being a figurative term here), aiming for your legs, and then drop themselves right on top of your feet.  This maneuver is deliberately designed to stop you in your tracks so you’ll have to bend down and pet them.  Every one of the cerebellar hypoplasia animals does this … and it’s very clever, because it works!  I was out trying to take photos of some of the dogs frolicking in the snow, and Smokey kept parking himself on my boots.  So I looked straight down with the camera and got that photo.

(Click on photo for larger image.)

Our fabulous longtime volunteer, Laura B. of Helena, came out on Friday to adopt three-legged Kasha.  Now, Laura is not exactly new to adopting from the ranch — she’s adopted four animals already from us over the years.  That includes the little scamp she’s holding in her arms in this photo, Rudy.  He was only here for a couple of months before Laura fell in love with him and took him home, so he never even got his own page on our Web site.  He’s a wobbler who came to us from a rescue group in Salt Lake City.

A number of people had expressed interest to us over the past few months about adopting Kasha, although no one ever stood up and said, "I’m ready!"  But Laura had never said anything, and instead was quietly eyeing this beautiful Shepherd and thinking about making her part of the family.  So when she asked me last week about adopting Kasha, at first I was surprised and then — a nanosecond later — delighted at the idea.  We couldn’t think of a better home for Kasha than the one Laura would provide.

I talked with Laura a few times over the weekend and she reports that Kasha is doing great.  "Kasha is such a sweet girl!," she said.  Rudy is learning to adjust to having another dog in the family — he has a case of something called SDNS ("Small Dog/Napoleon Syndrome") — but with a little work, he’s coming around.

Thanks to Laura for giving this special girl such a wonderful home!

I took this photo late yesterday afternoon just outside my office.  That’s our old boy, Dillon, resting his chin on blind-and-deaf Blanca.  This still-growing Great Dane puppy is content to lay her big frame right next to another dog, even if it means half the bed space for each of them.  Dillon had been lying there peacefully when Blanca came over and plopped herself down.  Since she was clearly crowding him, he decided to make the best of the situation and use her as a chin rest.

Dillon, who is one of our original "Seattle six-pack" of dogs who moved out with us to Montana, is now a rickety 15-year old.  He increasingly struggles to walk, and he can no longer get up on his own.  He’ll bark to let us know he needs help to get up.  He’s also fecally incontinent and has been for most of this year.  If his backside looks a bit different, it’s because we’ve clipped the hair there and on the underside of his tail.  This makes it easier to clean him up, which we need to do at least three times a day.

Watching him shuffle as he walks, and seeing him try to rise on his own but fail, there are days when we ask ourselves, "Is it time?"  But he still loves to eat, and at bed time, his eyes still sparkle when we give him his goodnight cookie.  And as stiff and awkward as the rest of his body is, he has an amazing knack for being able to catch a cookie in mid-air with his mouth.  That part of his body is working great!

Alayne caught Daisy the rascally Dachshund about to chew up Mr. Caterpillar … again.  You may recall that back in July, Alayne caught Daisy chewing holes in Mr. Caterpillar’s head and pulling the stuffing all out.  But here she was once more, having hoisted Mr. Caterpillar up onto the cot to begin a new fluffy feast.

So this is the look Daisy gave Alayne when she realized she’d been discovered.  Pure innocence.  "I was just going to rest my chin on Mr. Caterpillar, honest!"

Not believing her, of course, Alayne pulled Mr. Caterpillar away and put him in a safe location.  For now.

At feeding time this morning we found Lilah, one of our sighted horses, had cut her face open.  She had a deep wound right down the center, all the way to the bone.  A thick flap of skin hung loose.  Blood was everywhere.  In fact, even Patches, our other sighted mare who is Lilah’s buddy, had blood on her; it appeared that Lilah had been using Patches as equine tissue paper to wipe the blood off her face.  (Resourceful, huh?)

I called our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula.  Erin came out here a short while later to clean the wound and suture it closed.  I took the photo above of Erin working on a sedated Lilah in the horse stock in our medical room at Beauty’s Barn. 

When I first met Erin at the barn this morning, she said cryptically:  "I know what you’re going to say." 

I said, "About what?"

Erin replied, "Just wait. I’ll let you know when you say it."

Me: "Say what?"

Erin:  "I’m not telling.  But you will."

Hmm.

About 15 minutes later, Erin was just about to sew up the bloody wound when I said, "You realize, of course, that this is a horse who can see."

Erin turned to me, laughed, and said, "There!  You just said it.  That’s what I was waiting for!"

Blind horses have a completely unfounded reputation for being prone to injury … people assume that a 1,000-pound animal that can’t see is going to get hurt all the time.  It’s one of the many unfortunate myths about these wonderful animals.  In fact, the opposite is true.  They tend to be very careful and cautious in their movements because they know they can’t see and they don’t want to get hurt.

Thus I have this (apparently well-known) habit of pointing out when sighted horses like Lilah hurt themselves in dumb ways from things that, yes, they can see.  We looked at the pasture Lilah was in and couldn’t find any obvious source for the injury … but clearly she managed to find something to cut her face on.  She’s been in this pasture for about three months, too, so it wasn’t a new environment.

We see more sighted horses do goofy things and get themselves cut up, and the blind horses rarely do.

So we have a saying here at the ranch, a twist on an old expression:  "Where there’s a way, they will."

After more than two weeks in our isolation cottage, Popeye the blind cat from Lebanon finally moved into the cat house this past weekend.  All of his tests came back negative — we ran titers on four different viruses — giving him a clean bill of health.  His CBC (complete blood count) profile and chemistry panel all looked great, too, as did his thyroid.  Our small animal vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, explained to me that this means what happened to his eyes was most likely a response to a viral infection of some sort, which his body’s immune system finally and successfully fought off … but at the cost of his vision.  He has no active disease processes going on now.

I took these photos of Popeye in the cat house playing with that toy I call a springy-thingy … although I’ve seen them called a pom-pom and a ‘swat exerciser,’ among other names.  Because Popeye can see shapes and shadows through a small opening in his right eye, he can kind of … sort of … see that it was moving.  The hard part was getting his aim lined up and ready to swat it back.  In the photo above you can tell he went wide of the mark.  (Reminds me of my former tennis game.)

So after a few misses, Popeye would decide to take control of the situation and that confounded pom-pom.  That’s what he’s doing in this photo.  He’d push it all the way down, then ease up gently, and do this a few times.  Then, when he thought he knew exactly where it was going to spring back, he’d let go.  And sometimes he’d nail that thing with his paw, and feel very pleased with himself!