Alayne captured these shots of Birdie rolling around on her back on the landscaping rocks outside our back door.
Now, our dogs roll around on their backs in the grass all the time, but these rocks don’t seem like they’d be all that comfortable, do they? I mean, what do they have that grass doesn’t?
Nevertheless, Birdie was rolling away on them, back and forth. It may have been she was just showing off for the camera — doing whatever she thought would get Alayne’s attention. It worked!
Birdie — Bossy Birdie, we call her — is an attention hog, and whenever we have visitors, she goes crazy when they’re on the other side of the fence from her. She has this odd, insistent bark/whine that sounds more like a seal than a dog. I’ve told her I’m going to teach her how to balance a ball on her nose like a real seal, and then she’d have a true attention-getting trick to show off.
But apparently she already thinks she’s a roll ‘n rock star.
We’ve reached the point in the grazing season where all the blind horses on pasture are getting grain served twice a day … and some of the very old ones are getting served three times a day. This summer became way too hot, way too soon, and the grasses browned out much earlier than usual. This lowered not just the protein level but also the overall nutritional value of the grass as forage.
Our local power co-op’s monthly bill lists the average temperature at our meter for both the current billing month and the same period a year ago. On our bill for this August, the average temperature was 90 degrees vs. 68 degrees a year ago (32 degrees C vs. 20 degrees C). That heat took a huge toll on the grass.
So for several weeks now we’ve been loading up buckets of equine senior grain and delivering them to the horses scattered in various pastures across the ranch. We usually do this with the ranch ATV. I took the photo this evening after giving blind Domino (on the left) and his girlfriend, blind Guadalupe, their grain.
Next to the water tank is their salt block, their mineral block, and in the green tub is their protein block. The dried grass is fine for roughage, but the protein block helps give them the additional protein the grass lacks. The grain makes sure they get enough of everything they need to maintain their weight.
You’ll recall that Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell ringing. Our dog with the fused jaw, Travis, salivates at the sound of the blender whirring up his liquid food. For the horses, it’s the sound of the ATV coming that really gets their juices flowing!
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A note about yesterday’s post on Blanca in the chair: Some folks wondered how Blanca knew I had left the chair, since she is blind and deaf. Sorry, I should have mentioned that she had been lying on a dog bed right in front of the chair at my feet, so she could feel me get up and move.
Blind-and-deaf Blanca, our new arrival from Mexico, has decided her favorite chair in the house is my chair in the living room. The only problem is that the chair isn’t exactly sized right for a lanky and growing Great Dane. We were fixing up the dogs’ dinner (that’s what blind Kenai and blind Evelyn in this photo are waiting for) when Alayne noticed Blanca crammed in the chair, legs thrust out and head buried.
Last night I found a few minutes to catch up on some stockpiled reading material (The Horse and Equus magazines, in case you’re wondering), and at one point I got out of the chair to go open the door for one of the dogs. In the 30 seconds it look me to leave the chair and walk to the front door and back, Blanca climbed into it and plunked herself down. She apparently had just been waiting for me to vacate it, and made her move!
Here’s a photo of the chair thief taken a couple of days ago, showing her a a bit more comfortably arranged in it. One of our blog readers referred to her ears as "catcher’s mitts," and I think he was on to something.
Blind Brynn and blind Darby were the other two horses who went to the vet clinic yesterday. I brought them home today, along with blind Blue.
We had discovered blood in Brynn’s urine on Tuesday during her morning bath — she leaks while we bathe her, so we get up close and personal with her urine every day! Obviously blood in her urine set off our alarm bells, and we needed that checked out right away. As long-time followers of the blog know, Brynn’s entire urinary system is honked up, she’s had two (so far unsuccessful) surgeries, and she’s now down to one kidney, too. None of this bothers her, though, and she continues to be her sweet, happy, affectionate little self.
She had blood in her urine on Wednesday, too, but by today the bleeding had — for some unknown reason — cleared up. In the photo above that I took this afternoon, our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, is doing an ultrasound on Brynn’s left kidney. Erin is holding the probe in her left hand and looking at the images on the monitor as she slides the probe around. Erin also examined Brynn’s bladder and the rest of her plumbing.
We know from earlier ultrasounds at WSU’s veterinary teaching hospital that Brynn had kidney stones, and Erin found similar results today. It’s possible that one or more of them had passed through, or some of the raw material the stones are made from had migrated down her ureter, causing the bleeding. So at this point we’ll just have to keep a very close eye on her urine. Her blood work today showed her critical kidney values were normal, which is great news.
Darby is an older, blind mare whose eyes bulged from glaucoma. We had been treating a painful left eye for the past week. We’d made some progress, but the time had come to throw in the towel and take the eye out. Her right eye also had uncomfortably high pressure in it, so Erin removed it as well. We’ve found, time and again, that when blind eyes get this way, the best thing to do is take them out … and the relief is almost immediate. Alayne took this photo of me with Darby after we got back to the ranch this afternoon.
This morning I took three of our blind horses to see our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula. (More on the other two horses, Darby and Brynn, tomorrow.) Blue the blind Appaloosa needed surgery for two problems: he turned out to have a squamous cell carcinoma on his sheath that had to be removed (Erin had done a biopsy last week, and we just got the pathology results), and he had a painful eye we’d been treating for the past few days.
The eye — his only remaining one — was not showing your typical signs of discomfort, i.e., squinting and tearing. But it seemed uncomfortable, and the surface of the cornea was suddenly changing, developing indentations. These weren’t corneal ulcers, i.e., ruptures in the cornea, but more like ripples on the surface of a pond. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on, but something wasn’t right.
In the photo at the top, Erin is injecting a local nerve block around his eye before beginning the enucleation, or removal, surgery. Blue is blind from uveitis, and although he’s been blind for years, the disease can continue to cause repeated episodes of inflammation and other problems secondary to uveitis. We had removed his other eye a couple of years ago for similar reasons. This time Blue was suffering from a stromal abscess, which is inside the cornea. Ouch.
In this photo Erin’s vet tech Courtney is prepping his eye for surgery. Blue is on top of an operating table that can be raised to different heights and then retracted into the floor, so when the horse is waking up from anesthesia, he is already on the ground. In many cases, like with Blue today, it’s just as easy to do the surgery while the horse is lying down, and the table remains retracted.
Here Erin is finishing the squamous cell carincoma surgery. The Merck Veterinary Manual describes this type of cancer in horses this way — I italicized all the factors that relate to Blue: "Cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas are the most common
malignant neoplasm in horses. They generally develop in adult or aged
horses with white or part-white coats; breeds at risk include Appaloosa, Belgian, American Paint, and Pinto. Although they can arise
anywhere on the body, these tumors most commonly arise in nonpigmented,
poorly haired areas near mucous membranes. Thus, the periorbital
regions, lips, nose, anus, and external genitalia (especially the penile sheath) are sites most likely to be affected."
(As we mention on Blue’s Web page, we have no idea why a white horse was named Blue.)
Following the surgery, I aimed the videocamera at the clinic’s closed circuit TV monitor so we could tape Blue getting up after anesthesia. Here’s a 45-second clip:
I had a call several weeks ago from an elderly lady in California who had heard we had blind-and-deaf dogs. She wanted to let me know, in no uncertain terms, that she thought it was cruel and inhumane to keep them alive. That’s how the call began. Now, this wasn’t an animal-phobic person … she had an old dog she treasured, and she donated lots of money to spay and neuter programs … and she could even understand how a blind dog could "get around" okay. But a blind AND deaf dog? She couldn’t fathom how that animal wouldn’t be a fearful, cringing wreck.
As you can imagine, my first impulse was to hang up on the cranky old lady. But when I asked her if she’d seen our Web site, she said she didn’t use a computer and had no access to the Internet. Then I realized she was living in a vacuum and simply didn’t know what she was talking about. So I told her about Spinner and the sheer joy Spinner takes in life … how she bounces out of the cottage every morning, nose straight up, spinning around, taking in the smells of the day. Baron, the little blind-and-deaf guy from Oregon, had just arrived, so I told her about him, too. By the end of the 45-minute conversation, she apologized for her initial brusque behavior on the phone and the views she expressed. She said, "I just didn’t see how it would be possible for them to be anything but scared about the world, and I was mad at you for forcing them to live like that. I’m sorry."
I followed up by sending her our newsletter and a note, which brings me to the video below. I shot this the other day in my office. Blind Widget and blind-and-deaf Baron suddenly started roughhousing together on the dog bed behind my chair, so I grabbed the video camera sitting on my desk, whirled around, and started taping. It’s 2 minutes, and the last half of that is Widget shifting tactics to a more vocal approach before she concludes with a victory serenade.
You can be sure I’ll be making a DVD of this video to send to our new friend in California.
It doesn’t take long for summer to start fading in the Northern Rockies. Even though the days can still be quite warm, the nights can get downright cold. When we got up this morning, it was 24 degrees. (For our international friends, that’s minus 4 degrees Celsius.) I took this photo of Widget’s House about 7:30 a.m., when the sun had just come up over the mountain range to the east of us.
Now, bear in the mind this wasn’t our first frost. That was actually back on August 22nd! Here’s a photo I took that morning of frost in the grass. I intended to post it on our blog then, but that was the day Tonto went into surgery.
Alayne and I spent a good part of this weekend stacking a winter’s worth of firewood — three cords of it — in the wood shed, finally finishing Sunday afternoon. (One cord is a stack of wood measuring four feet wide by four feet high and eight feet long.) It seemed a bit ironic because it was hot and sunny, and winter seemed a long way off. But it was already a brisk 37 degrees when I went out to check on the horses at 9:30 p.m. last night, and I could tell it was going to get much colder before dawn arrived. So after a weekend stacking firewood, it seemed fitting to wake up the next morning to 24 degrees!
Alayne took these photos of blind and deaf Spinner in our welcome center about mid-day on Friday, when our vet Dr. Brenda Culver was here. Spinner was just hanging out in the too-small dog bed after her exam. We were having a conversation during a lunch break when Brenda popped a frozen-food dish in the microwave. The microwave door had barely closed and the turntable wasn’t even spinning yet.
Suddenly, Spinner erupted into her "Look out! Something’s new here!" barking routine, her head swiveling around, side-to-side, front-to-back, nose up, scanning the ether. Her shrill alarm-barks filled the room.
Brenda looked at Spinner, then at me, with a "What is that all about?" look on her face. I asked Brenda, "Did you just puncture a hole in the plastic on top of the dish before you put it in the microwave?" She had. I explained what happened. Puncturing the plastic had released new smells into the room, and Spinner immediately picked them up and was letting us know.
Now, you and I may not be able to smell frozen food through tiny holes punctured by a fork 10 feet away, but Spinner certainly can! And she wants to make sure we know about it.
I told Brenda the story about a similar episode, when I took Spinner to an eye specialist in San Diego for surgery in 2005. (The operation to restore her eyesight didn’t work.) The eye surgeon had just finished examining Spinner and had turned around to wash his hands in the exam room sink. Suddenly Spinner burst into her barking routine, thoroughly alarming the surgeon and his vet tech. Then, as now, it was a new smell released into the air. I asked the surgeon if he had just put soap on his hands. Sure enough, he had pumped soap onto his hands from a liquid soap dispenser, and although none of us could smell it, Spinner could.
Alayne was actually already shooting photos of Spinner when this
happened on Friday, because she thought Spinner looked funny, squashed on top of
the tiny dog bed. That’s how we happened to get the photos!
Our small animal vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was out at the ranch all day Friday doing the annual health exams and vaccinations for the dogs. With 40 dogs, this is quite the undertaking! We divided the job into two parts. First, we did the "cottage" dogs … these are the ones that stay with Alayne and me in our house or in the cottages next to our house. Typically these are the small dogs, the incontinent ones, the dogs that need more intensive medical care, the blind-and-deaf, and the new arrivals — roughly, about 20 dogs in all. The other 20 dogs stay in our main dog building, Widget’s House.
For the cottage dogs, Brenda set up shop in our welcome center for the morning, and we brought them out one by one or in small groups, depending on size. In the photo above, Brenda is examining little Bailey the miniature Dachshund. And here is the entire Dachshund crowd, gathered around Brenda waiting for a treat. From left to right that’s Bailey, Belvie, blind Callie, and Daisy. Daisy is the bossiest, Belvie is the loudest, Callie is the, um, most expansive, and Bailey is the quiet, sensitive one.
No, that’s not actually the entire Dachshund crowd. Refusing to participate in the festivities was old, deaf Oscar, who was pretending to not be there because his Mommy, the Minion Leader, wasn’t in the room. So he turned his back and decided to stare at the chair instead. Oh, well.
We finished with the cottage dogs about 2:00 p.m., and then headed over to Widget’s House for the rest of pack. I think it was nearly 7 p.m. by the time Brenda was able to wrap up and hit the road back to Helena.
Our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor of Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula, came out to the ranch today for several cases:
— Beaver the Belgian needed round two of a treatment for a sarcoid tumor on his belly. Erin gave him the first treatment two weeks ago — here’s a photo I took then — and we’ll do at least one more treatment before we can tell how much progress we’re really making. But the tumor did seem to have shrunk in the past couple of weeks.
— Blue the blind Appaloosa needed to have a suspicious red, icky area on his sheath biopsied as a possible cancer. We suspect a sarcoid or a squamous cell carcinoma.
— Cash the blind foal needed to be examined because he has a bit of pot belly; this might be normal foal conformation, but just in case it isn’t, we wanted him checked out to make sure it’s not parasites or something else. (Yes, he is regularly dewormed, and no, he isn’t drinking beer.) So Erin did a physical exam, ran bloodwork, and took a fecal sample.
— Darby the blind mare needed an eye pressure check because of a painful eye we’ve been treating for a week with only limited success. She has glaucoma, and we were concerned that she was having a pressure spike in the eye and/or a uveitis flare-up. (Glaucoma in horses is typically a secondary result of uveitis.) Ironically, her "bad" eye — the one that’s been squinty, tearing, and looking very uncomfortable — had a lower-than-expected pressure reading of 45 units of mercury (high end of normal is 33). Her supposedly "good" eye, which wasn’t showing any discomfort, registered double that, with readings of 88 and 95. Ouch. We kept testing and testing and coming up with the same results. So now we’re a bit baffled. It’s clearly not a pressure spike causing the discomfort, more likely a uveitis flare-up that is just proving tough to get under control.
— Cactus Jack the blind Appaloosa also needed an eye exam. Ironically, he had developed a painful, squinty, teary eye the same day that Darby did, but unlike her, his eye responded quickly to treatment. Cactus is blind from glaucoma, too, so we wanted to check his eye pressure as well. That’s what Erin is doing in the photo at the very top, while Alayne holds Cactus. She’s using our Tono-Pen, the medical device that Medtronic donated to us a few years ago. (Medtronic has since sold the product line to another company.) In this photo, Erin is calibrating the Tono-Pen between readings (you have to reset it each time). Amazingly, his eye pressure was as low as we had ever seen it … the eye we’d been treating registered 21, which is normal! And the other eye was within normal, too. No, that doesn’t change his vision — he will always be blind because the damage was done a long time ago — but it does mean his eyes are comfortable.
