Rolling Dog Farm Blog

We had hoped Claude would live long enough to meet this little girl, but he died two days before Blanca arrived at the ranch.  And if you’re doing a double-take, it’s because she’s a Great Dane puppy, too, who looks uncannily like him.  She’s also the exact same age — 4 months — that Claude was when he came to us.  Like Claude, she was born with microphthalmia, which means her eyeballs are malformed and not functional.  She’s completely blind in her left eye (there really isn’t anything there) but she can see — we think — shapes and shadows from her shrunken right eye.  She’s also completely deaf.

When Blanca’s owner in Guadalajara, Mexico, asked us a few weeks ago if we could take Blanca, we knew that Claude wouldn’t have much longer to live.  So we thought it would be a wonderful way to honor him by letting another blind Great Dane puppy take his place.  We just wanted him to still be with us when she arrived, but that was not to be.

Blanca was one of 18 puppies born on April 1st to a Great Dane named Manta.  Manta’s owner is Rosanna M., an American citizen living in Guadalajara.  Rosanna had hoped to keep the beautiful white puppy she named Luna, but finally concluded that she didn’t have the right environment to care for a puppy with these kinds of disabilities.  In Guadalajara, Rosanna’s options were limited.  Even the veterinary ophthalmologist she took the puppy to see had said Rosanna should put the dog down. 

Rosanna and I spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to figure out how to fly the puppy out of Mexico and up to Montana.  It’s not easy!  Most of the U.S. airlines flying out of Guadalajara or nearby Puerto Vallarta either wouldn’t transport animals from Mexico, or they stopped first in places like Los Angeles, meaning you have to clear customs, then re-book the animal for the onward journey.  Finally an Alaska Airlines employee told me that Aeromexico had a flight from Guadalajara to Seattle and would transport animals. 

So Rosanna called Aeromexico, booked a ticket for herself and the baby Dane, and on Saturday a week ago they flew to Seattle.  On Sunday, Rosanna drove over to our old neighborhood in Bellevue to drop the puppy off with a wonderful friend of ours, Bindy O., who does pet sitting and also works in our former veterinary clinic.  Bindy took great care of this little girl for us all of last week.  Then yesterday, another set of Seattle friends and supporters of the sanctuary, Jan R. and Wayne S., brought her out to Montana for us.

(And that’s not all they brought out.  Jan and Wayne stopped in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to pick up two more animals for us who came from the Panhandle Animal Shelter in Sandpoint.  But I’m saving those two for tomorrow’s blog post!)

Although we liked the name ‘Luna,’ we already have an animal with the same name … our blind mare Luna from Colorado … so we decided to call this adorable puppy Blanca.  Because she’s deaf, it doesn’t really matter to her, but it will keep us from getting confused!

I will admit that when I saw Blanca for the first time yesterday, I teared up.  She looks so much like Claude when he was that age that you could mistake them for twins.  But this is how the ‘circle of life’ goes for us:  We lose one young life on Thursday, and on Saturday another young life arrives.

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He didn’t even make it through the second summer of his tragically short life.  We lost our blind Great Dane Claude today to his Wobbler’s Syndrome.  When the end came, it came fast.

Back on July 4th, I posted an update on Claude and said he was still going strong.  We were managing his neurological disease medically, and he was showing few signs of his Wobblers.  But a week after I posted that, he began wobbling again … first a little, then a lot.  After consulting with our veterinarians, we increased his dosage on the medication.  It helped a bit, for a while.  Yet he increasingly had difficulty getting up and down, and he would fish-tail occasionally when walking.  His face became puffy, his hair coarse and his skin dry.  He developed sores on his legs.  These were all consequences of the prednisone therapy.  He started looking like he just didn’t feel well.

Then, two days ago, he went down and couldn’t get up.  When we helped him up, he’d walk a short ways and then start sinking to the ground.  And although he continued to eat, his breathing began sounding labored.  He looked unhappy.  The spark was gone.  We could just look at his face and see it.  We knew the time had come.

At noon today Alayne and I placed a soft fleece blanket on the stretcher, lifted Claude onto it, and carried him out to the truck.  I took the photo of Claude just before Alayne drove him to our vet clinic in Helena, Montana Veterinary Specialists.  There our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, brought his young life to a gentle, dignified and peaceful end.  He was barely 15 months old. 

Goodbye, Claude.  We love you.

It was just about three weeks ago that I posted a photo of Bailey enjoying a siesta in his favorite shady spot, under the cottonwood tree at the front of the house.  Well, starting last week Bailey selected a new favorite shady spot, this one under the aspen tree at the back of the house.  Apparently the cottonwood spot was so…well…last month.  It’s a new month, requiring a new tree.

Bailey began spending so much time under the aspen, just sitting on the rocks, that Alayne ended up putting a dog bed under the tree for him.  (At least under his cottonwood he had grass to lie on!) 

We don’t know why our little arborist decided to change trees, but he did.  I took this photo of him lying there yesterday.  I think the only thing missing from this scene is a man-servant standing over Bailey, fanning him with palm fronds.  (Hey, listen, I was busy!)

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The camera crew had barely left this morning (see post below) when the grain crew arrived.  On board the trailer were one ton of equine "senior" grain in 50 lb bags for the old blind horses like Scout, and one ton of equine "growth" grain for our blind youngsters like Cash, plus another 500 pounds of salt and mineral blocks.

Now, after seven years of unloading these kinds of shipments by hand (i.e., the ranch gym work-out), we finally got a set of pallet forks for the tractors this spring.  Whew!  Alayne took this photo of me lifting the first pallet load off the trailer.  (Note farmer’s tan on right arm.)

Of course, the pallet forks make it much easier to unload, but we still have to stack the grain sacks by hand inside the barns.  (There isn’t enough room in the barn aisles to maneuver the tractor around to place the pallets where we need them.)  So we still get quite the work-out, just half of what we used to get — and that’s progress!

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A big, global non-profit called the International Fund for Animal Welfare, or IFAW, notified us a few weeks ago that we were one of the winners of their 2007 Animal Action Awards.  The notification letter from IFAW’s president, Frederick O’Regan, said, "Congratulations on being selected to join an elite group of animal heroes worldwide who will receive a 2007 IFAW Animal Action Award.  This international award recognizes your work to provide safe haven for disabled animals at the Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary."

Mr. Regan’s letter continued, "For the past 15 years, IFAW Animal Action Awards have honored extraordinary efforts to protect wild and domestic animals and their habitats, including such distinguished international recipients as Jane Goodall and Farley Mowat."

They aren’t publicly announcing this until they hold an awards ceremony in Santa Monica, California, in early October, but the wheels are already in motion for the publicity.  They had a camera crew out here today to tape a piece on the sanctuary, which they will show at the October event.  They will also air an Animal Action Awards special program about us and the other recipients that same week on the TV program Animal Rescue, which IFAW sponsors.  (We don’t know who the other recipients are.)

Although we don’t like to be called "heroes" and frankly, it makes us uncomfortable — as Alayne told the camera crew today, it’s our animals who are the real heroes for overcoming their disabilities, certainly not us — this kind of recognition is a powerful tool in spreading the word about disabled animals.  A lot more people will learn about the wonderful quality of life these animals can have if they’re only given a chance.

So I got this photo of Alayne talking on camera this morning about Baron, the little
blind-and-deaf guy who arrived a few weeks ago.  The crew, who had
flown in from L.A. last night, seemed genuinely taken with our disabled
gang and were very happy with the video they got.  The Dachshunds, Daisy on the left and Bailey on the right, were a bit nonchalant about the whole thing by this point, because they had already had their moment on camera!

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We had a couple of folks who asked us to tell Dolly’s story after seeing her in the photo of Wobs yesterday.  Well, here goes! 

When Alayne and I got married in Seattle, she had her own dog, Spats — a beautiful, sweet older Lab mix with a white chest and white feet (hence his name).  Although I was a ‘cat guy’ — with six cats I had brought back to the U.S. from my last diplomatic assignment in Sri Lanka —  I wanted a dog of my own.  But first I had to convince my new wife that Spats really, really wouldn’t mind a companion.  (If any of you are married to attorneys, you know what I had to go through to win this — or any — argument.)

In those days — mid-90s — most shelters didn’t have Web sites yet, and in Puget Sound they used a little monthly newspaper called the Muttmatchers Messenger to post their animals.   I saw a photo of a black-and-tan dog named Dolly who was in a small, private shelter called Adopt-A-Pet in Shelton, Washington.  What caught my attention was her name, because I had grown up with a dog named Dolly.  But there was something else that struck me about her photo … she seemed fearful.

I called the shelter and an elderly lady named Elsie Skipworth answered the phone.  Elsie and her husband ran the shelter and lived across the road from the kennels.  She told me Dolly had first come to Adopt-A-Pet in a litter of puppies, and the shelter had adopted her out to someone locally.  At the time Dolly was a bright, outgoing, happy, perfectly normal puppy.  Several months later, they heard a ruckus early one morning in the kennels.  The dogs were all barking and going crazy.  They went out to investigate … and discovered Dolly was back.  She had been thrown over the fence. 

The dog they found was not the same one they had adopted out.  This Dolly was traumatized.  She was scared to death of the Skipworths and anyone else.  She trembled when people approached.  She would slink on her belly and try to disappear into the ground.  It took months for Dolly to come to trust the Skipworths again.   So when I called, Elsie explained all this and told me point-blank that Dolly’s fear of people probably made her unadoptable.

I said, "She sounds perfect.  I’ll take her!"

Because she looks like a Doberman, we suspect whoever had adopted her tried to turn her into a guard dog.  They wanted to make her tough and mean by beating her.  When they finally realized they had created not a guard dog but a wreck of a dog, they drove back to the shelter and threw her over the fence.

We made the two-hour trip to Shelton the next weekend.  Sure enough, Dolly was a frightened wreck.  She quivered with fear when I clipped a leash on her collar.  Then she tried to crawl away from me, her nails digging into the dirt as she clawed at the ground.  It was heartbreaking.  I finally had to pick her up and carry her to the car.  When we got home, I had to carry her into the house and down the stairs to the family room.  I laid her down on a dog bed in the corner.  She didn’t move.  She just stared at me with this terrified look.  For two weeks she didn’t leave that spot except to go out the door to go potty. 

Then one day she quietly made it up the stairs and stuck her head around the corner.  We’ll never forget that moment when we saw her head appear at the top of the stairs.  She was coming out of her shell.

Dolly decided that she could trust us but not others.  And she adored us.  But everyone else got a growl.  When Alayne’s parents came to visit and dog-sit while Alayne and I went on a trip, Dolly would growl menacingly at them.  Uh oh.  I tried everything to get Dolly to accept Alayne’s parents, but she wasn’t having anything of it.  Finally, I told her parents to take Dolly for a walk.  They looked at me as if I was trying to get the inheritance early.  Alayne shot me a death look that said, "You’re out of your mind."  I said, "No, really, let’s try this.  Take her for a walk.  I’ll start out with you and then you take over." 

We were no more than 10 yards from the house when I handed them the leash and sent them on their way.  Twenty minutes later they returned, all smiles and Dolly wagging her tail.  From that point on, Dolly loved them and they loved Dolly.  We’d call in every day during our trip and all we’d hear about was how wonderful Dolly was.  Alayne would have to ask them, "Say, how is SPATS, by the way?"

Dolly continues to be suspicious of everyone else, and always … I mean always … growls at members of MY family.  That’s why my nieces and nephews refer to her as "Evil Aunt Dolly."  I’ve sent them photos of Dolly licking Alayne’s parents in the face, and they think I’ve doctored the photos.  They don’t buy it.

Now that Dolly is 12 and has had two knee operations, she’s starting to mellow out and become a little more accepting of new people.  But she did become my girl, and to this day she will listen only to me … unless I’m not around, in which case she will begrudgingly listen to Alayne.  Which, as I recall, was exactly how it was with Spats!

I ended up hauling horses to and from the vet hospital three days in a row last week … no wonder it seemed like I was on the road to Missoula a lot!  On Wednesday I had taken Lena in to see the vet and picked up Copper Kid to bring him back to the ranch.  On Thursday morning, we were out checking on horses in the pasture when I noticed blind Bridger’s right eye seemed a bit squinty.  I went up to investigate, and found he had a corneal ulcer that was eating into his eye.  Uh oh.  Sometimes if we catch them early enough we can begin treating these ulcers ourselves, but not this one.  He needed to get to the clinic. 

So we brought Bridger and his girlfriend blind Madison in from pasture and put them in a corral while I brought the truck and horse trailer around to Beauty’s Barn.  I took this photo of Alayne holding Bridger just before we loaded him.  You can see that right eye looks uncomfortable, and it was.

I had already called Dr. Erin Taylor at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital to let her know about our newest problem.  I drove Bridger into Missoula and left him at the clinic for Erin to see when she returned from another case.  She called after examining him, and we concluded that the best thing to do was remove the eye.  The ulcer had already done a lot of damage, and the fastest, surest way to give him relief was to take the eye out.  With these blind guys, all they know is the pain is gone.  So Erin operated Thursday evening, and Bridger came through the surgery just fine.

I took this photo of Erin with Bridger on Friday afternoon, when I drove back to Missoula to pick him up.  I could tell he was already feeling better.  Eyes can be incredibly painful, and  so the relief is immense.  Erin and the team at Blue Mountain did a wonderful job of caring for this boy. 

And since his lovebug Madison is missing an eye, the two of them will now be a matched set.  Speaking of Madison, she began whinnying to Bridger in the trailer as we pulled up to the barn — "I just know you’re in there!" — and the two of them started calling to each other like they’d been separated for years, not 24 hours.  After I unloaded Bridger, I could barely hold onto him as he tried to race from the trailer to the corral to rejoin her.  When I finally got him into the corral, they went right up to each other, face to face, and then put their heads over each other’s necks.  And I swear I could hear them sigh.  It was just the cutest thing.

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Yesterday evening, when I went into the cat house to feed the gang, I noticed Wobbles’ eyes looked just a bit different.  Not as open as they typically are.  And he didn’t get off the bed to wobble out to greet me.  These are the two classic signs that he’s coming down with aspiratory pneumonia … again.

I went to get the thermometer, and sure enough, he had a fever … 103.4.  I called our small animal vet clinic in Helena, Montana Veterinary Specialists, and Dr. Jennifer Rockwell walked me through the drill.  Jennifer had successfully treated Wobs during his last episode in May, which was a real crisis.  I thought I had detected this onset early enough that we could treat him here and not rush him the 70 miles to the clinic on a Saturday night, so Jennifer told me what Wobs needed:  Baytril, Amoxicillin, and sub-Q fluids.  We had everything in stock (whew!), so I set forth to start the treatment.  Alayne took this photo in the cat house as I was giving Wobs his Amoxi.  "Yuck!," was the response I got.  I had already given him an injection of Baytril.

Then it was off to the house (the people house) for his sub-Q fluids. There are some cats who will lie quietly in your lap while the fluid slowly drips in under the skin, so you can read a magazine, check your email, or accomplish something else productive.  Not with Wobs.  He’s a squirmer, requiring one hand to hold him and the other hand to make sure the needle doesn’t slide out.  In this photo you can see that Wobs and I had some company — a very inquisitive Dolly, who wanted to know what we were up to and why I couldn’t reach out and pet her.

(Dolly is one of our personal dogs from Seattle.  She had been abused as a puppy and was considered ‘unadoptable’ by the shelter because she was terrified of people.  She was, in fact, the most frightened animal I had ever seen when we adopted her 11 years ago.)

This morning, the results were in:  Wobs had a normal temperature again and wobbled out to greet me when I went into the cat house.  This is what is so remarkable about his pneumonia episodes — they come on within hours, but respond to treatment incredibly fast, too.  I gave him more sub-Q fluids today and we’ll continue the rest of his treatment for the next several days.  Wobble on!

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Since our July 31st post about the fires to the north and south of us, we’ve had several folks ask what our fire evacuation plan is.  Great question!  It’s something we have spent a lot of time on.  The fire threat for us is not a forest fire but, as I mentioned in that post, a wind-driven grass fire most likely caused by lightning during a thunderstorm.   

In that scenario, evacuation is not really an option with this many animals — 40 dogs, 32 horses, and 10 cats.  We’d need to own a couple of semi trucks with huge stock trailers … and even then, by the time we got everyone safely gathered and loaded, the grass fire would have swept through.  So evacuation is not practical or feasible.

Instead, our fire plan is based on creating "defensible" spaces around the barns and corrals and other buildings.  We would bring the horses into the corrals, which themselves are pretty fire-resistant with metal corral panels and nothing else to burn.  Each barn and set of corrals has 200 feet of hose and an accessible hydrant.

We had a grasslands and fire expert out for a site review a few weeks ago, in fact, to review our particular situation and our plan.  As a result of that visit, we found that our barns are actually well built to withstand fire (and all of our buildings have metal roofs).  The one recommendation was to reduce the likelihood of airborne embers getting trapped under eaves and erupting into flames hours after the main fire is out.  So our contractor is putting up screens or solid wood panels, depending on the structure, to close off the eaves.

Key to our defense plan is our fire trailer, which is what you see in the photo above.  The trailer has a fire suppression unit on board, which includes a 155-gallon water tank (the black square tank) and a 100′ high-pressure fire hose and pump powered by a Briggs & Stratton engine.  It’s all contained in that one unit, which is called a Defender 3.  The U.S. Forest Service uses a bigger version of this model for its pick-up truck-mounted fire suppression units.

By flipping a lever, the pump can reverse the flow and suck water into the tank for a rapid refilling, which is why we have a 200-gallon reserve water tank on the front of the trailer.  The big green hose is already set up to drop into the reserve tank for that purpose.  (The tank in the back of the truck is what we use to fill water troughs in the pastures.)  We also have two 300-gallon stock tanks filled with water and standing by for additional refill capacity.  The pump can suck in far more water, much faster, to fill the main tank than we can accomplish using a regular hose from a yard hydrant. 

This fire trailer will allow us to attack a fire as soon as it starts anywhere on the property, so we can (hopefully) keep it suppressed until help arrives from our local volunteer fire department.  With a wind-driven grass fire, 10 minutes of containment can make all the difference.

The other critical part of our defense plan is the National Weather Service radar for our region, which we keep running on a continuous loop on our office computers so we can monitor developing storms throughout the day and night.  This is what gives us the all-important heads-up if thunderstorms are headed towards us.  If we see a severe thunderstorm developing and tracking our way, we bring the blind horses in from pasture and put the dogs up.  Then we stay on alert until the storm passes.  Here’s what the radar looked like tonight as I was writing this post.

In the photo above of the fire trailer, you can see how dense the smoke is in our valley.  Normally you’d see a mountain range to the left behind Beauty’s Barn, but not today.  Look at the photo from the July 31st post for a comparison. We’re just packed with smoke. 

I went to the vet hospital in Missoula today to pick up Copper Kid, our young Quarter Horse who went down in the pasture last Friday.  Copper came to us three years ago because he had a neurological condition called cervical vertebral instability, more commonly called Wobbler Syndrome.  You can read his original story here.  In the past two years his condition had dramatically improved, and he was able to gallop across the pasture like a regular horse.  He would even rear up on his hind legs in the corral while he was playing with another of our sighted horses.  We didn’t consider him disabled any longer.

So when he went down on Friday, we were stunned.  What an incredible, devastating setback.  We found him lying on the ground on his left side, his right legs pawing at the air.  He was able to get up finally, and we slowly walked him back to the barns and loaded him into the horse trailer.  But he was clearly struggling to maintain his balance; he didn’t know where his feet were in space.

Since Friday night he’s been under the wonderful care of Dr. Erin Taylor, a board-certified veterinary surgeon, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital. Today I also took our blind mare Lena in to see Dr. Taylor for a respiratory issue.  Here is Dr. Taylor listening to Lena’s breathing, prior to performing some other tests.  She diagnosed Lena as having a mild case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.  As a result, we now have a treatment plan for Lena to follow.

Once we finished Lena’s exam, we moved on to the main event … getting Copper home.  As you’ll see in this video below that I took of Dr. Taylor and her vet tech, Courtney, walking Copper out to the trailer, he remains very compromised.  Look at how he crosses his feet, sways, drags his hooves, and generally seems not to know where his feet are.  (Courtney is holding his tail to help him balance.)  These are the classic signs of cervical vertebral instability.  This condition is classified into five grades, ranging from one — barely noticeable — to five, where the animal is down and unable to get up.  Copper is now a four.  Very, very serious.  And he’s only 6 years old.

We have three options for Copper.  One is euthanasia, which we don’t think is necessary because he’s not in any pain and he is still clearly ambulatory … if very wobbly!  The second option is spine stabilization surgery, which is an $8,000 to $10,000 procedure performed by an equine surgeon in California who specializes in this particular neurosurgery.  Yikes!  The operation would be done at Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital in Pullman and the surgeon would fly in there to do it.  The third option is strict stall rest and a regimen of anti-inflammatories while we wait to see if he improves with time.  Time can do a lot to help.

Erin said the neurosurgeon would want to wait a few weeks anyway to see if Copper stabilizes a little more on his own.  If we proceeded with the surgical option, we would have to take Copper to WSU for a myelogram first.  The WSU vets would send the myelogram images to the neurosurgeon in California for review, who would then decide if Copper was, in fact, a good candidate for surgery.  It’s possible he might conclude that surgery wouldn’t really help, given the severity of his condition.  Dr. Taylor said the goal of the surgery would be to lower his grade by at least one and hopefully two levels, i.e., from a Grade 4 to a 3 or even 2.  Can we afford that surgery?  Can we justify it?  I don’t know.  Like I said:  Yikes.

So that’s where we are at this point.  We’re really hoping that nature will ride to the rescue again and re-stabilize this handsome youngster all on his own.  But he is so much worse than when he first arrived, that’s unlikely.  Despite how he looks in this video, he was still standing in the trailer when we got home!