Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I spent most of today spreading the final windrow of compost on one of our south pastures, making multiple trips with the tractor and manure spreader from the compost "yard" behind Lena’s Barn to the pasture.  On each trip I would drive through the pasture where two of our old guys, blind Blue and blind Shasta, have been hanging out for the past couple of months.  By late this afternoon, they had begun dozing off, catching the last of the sunshine as they napped. 

I took this photo of Blue and Shasta on my final run with the spreader about 5:30 p.m.  That’s Blue on the left and Shasta on the right.  (They look like a matched pair, don’t they?)  Now, one of the nice things about blind horses is that you can leave gates open as you come and go … and they won’t go bolting out and down the drive.  So all day I left both gates into their pasture open as I drove in and out with the tractor to reach the far pasture where I was spreading.

This was the first summer we could actually leave Blue out to graze around the clock.  When he first came to us from the U.S. Forest Service a couple of years ago, he was so obese we had to keep him confined in the corral so we could maintain him on a strict diet.  Slowly the weight came off, and late this summer — once the grass had browned out and the protein content diminished — we were able to turn Blue and his buddy Shasta out to pasture and let them spend the fall grazing all they want.

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Here are two of our Dachshunds, Callie who is blind and Bailey who has orthopedic and neurological issues, hanging out by the dinner table.  I thought this was an interesting photo because of the way the flash reflected straight back from Callie’s retinas.  Hmm.  A bit early for Halloween, perhaps.

Callie’s blind from progressive retinal atrophy (PRA), in which retinal function diminishes because of a loss of blood to nourish the retinas.  To compensate, the pupils completely dilate to try and get as much light in as possible, although towards the end of PRA (as in Callie’s case) it doesn’t matter because there’s no vision left.

The two Dachshunds have made themselves at home on the towel we keep on the floor by the water bowl — the black object on the right — which is actually a salt block holder for horses.  (I think I’ve mentioned this before on the blog.)  It’s heavy, has a wide base, and is hard for big blind dogs to knock over.  However, it doesn’t keep them from walking into it, or from the ‘drink-and-run’ types like Birdie who manage to leave more water on the floor than they get down their throats.  Hence the ever-present towel.

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Alayne took blind Willie the Beagle and paralyzed Spirit the Yorkie to our vets in Helena today.  Willie is dripping blood from his urinary tract, and he also has heartworms, so we need to have his heart function assessed before we can begin treating him for the heartworms.  Spirit has developed an ulcer of some sort on her left eye and it’s beginning to cloud up, so we are very concerned about what’s going on there. 

I took the photo of Alayne holding Willie and Spirit just before she left for Helena this morning.  Willie sat very still, like a big lump of coal, while Spirit wriggled like a fish on a line.  Alayne managed to hold on to both of them long enough for me to take some photos, and I’m proud to say she didn’t drop either one the entire time!

Alayne left Willie and Spirit at the clinic, where they’ll spend the night.

That’s the sanctuary truck behind Alayne, and no, we don’t wash it — there’s no point when you live at the end of three miles of gravel road!

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Our horse trainer, Nichole Zupan, came by for her regular Monday evening workout with blind Nikki.  I took this photo while Nichole was saddling up Nikki for a session in the round pen.  Nichole’s schedule with Nikki is Monday and Wednesday evenings and Friday mornings.  We try to keep to this three times-a-week routine, weather permitting, of course (which is getting more iffy this time of year).

Here’s what it looked like from the other side … you can see Nikki’s pasture buddies, blind Lena and blind Destiny, in the adjoining field.  We had just moved Nikki from that pasture to the round pen.  Now the other two girls will patiently stay close by, waiting for class to get out.  It’s the cutest thing — they always wait for Nikki to get done, and never wander far from the fence line.

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I was headed out to start barn chores this evening when I looked back over my shoulder and saw this rather peculiar sight by the front of the house.  Deaf-and-blind Spinner, wearing a cone on her head, was pressed up against the wall as if she were listening for termites or trying to pick up CNN from the TV in the living room.

Spinner is wearing the cone because she has a sore on the bridge of her nose that started out as a small thing, but she began rubbing it so much that it became big and gnarly.  That defeated our attempts to get it healed.  So we put the cone on Spinner about five days ago.  She immediately went into a funk, or what I call a ‘perpetual pout.’  She refused to move, so we had to carry her out of Kelly’s Cottage in the morning and set her on the ground .. where she remained for the rest of the day, not budging from that spot.  It was a protest of some sort.

This went on for days, although I’m happy to report that she has finally begun to wander around the yard again.  I was actually rather pleased to see she had gotten as far as the front of the house this evening.  But why was she lying on the rocks (when there are dog cots all over the place, not to mention grass), and what was with the cone on the wall?

As I stood there, taking photos, the moment — and the questions — came to an abrupt end when big, blind Kenai sauntered over and walked right on top of Spinner.  (Blind dogs will be blind dogs.)  Spinner bolted to her feet and spun to the left, her reverie rudely interrupted, while Kenai spun to the right and disappeared around the corner.

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We noticed yesterday evening that our blind horse Chance hadn’t eaten all day.  Usually he plows through all the hay and grain we can give him.  He is beginning to deteriorate from his two-year long battle with lymphoma.  Just in the past two months he’s begun losing weight and his hair coat has become dull, and we know the cancer is taking its toll.  So we wondered yesterday if his lymphoma had something to do with it … or whether it was something else, like being pre-colicky.

From the barn I called our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown.  Bill asked me to listen to Chance’s heart rate, take his temperature, and report back. Alayne went to the  house to get the stethoscope and thermometer, and then she held Chance while I took his vital signs. They were, in a word, bad:  His heart was racing at 80 beats per minute (normal is 30-40) and his temperature was 104.8 degrees (normal is around 100).

I called Bill with the results.  "That’s a sick horse," he said.  Bill had us give Chance a massive dose of Naxcel, a powerful broad-spectrum injectable antibiotic, and a dose of Banamine, an anti-inflammatory.  The Naxcel dose was so large — 40 cc’s — that I had to inject it in three different places on Chance to avoid overloading any one injection site.

This morning Alayne and I went out to the barn with stethoscope and thermometer in hand, not sure what kind of condition we’d find Chance in.  That’s when Alayne took this photo of me listening to Chance’s heart.  We were relieved to discover his heart rate had dropped to 48 beats per minute, and his temperature had dropped to 102.6 degrees.  I called Bill to report on the progress.  Bill told us to give Chance another (smaller) dose of Naxcel and to repeat the Banamine, then take his vital signs again this evening.

And tonight, Chance’s heart rate was normal at 36 beats per minute and his temperature was 99.5.  That’s a remarkable turnaround in 24 hours — whew!

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So … THIS morning when I went into the cat house to clean, look what I found — wobbly Mink and deaf Snowball squeezed into that little round bed.  It turns out there IS room for two after all, assuming you like a tight fit.  Lulu was right, and apparently Mink just wasn’t very accommodating yesterday. 

It does make me wonder who was in the bed first, and just what kind of maneuvering the second cat had to do to get in there.

As you can tell from these photos, our cat house is a very snuggly place indeed.

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I walked into the cat house this morning to clean and found this sight waiting for me:  Wobbly Mink and one-eyed Lulu rather awkwardly sharing a bed.  Clearly there was only room for one cat in the bed, and that was Mink.  That didn’t stop Lulu from wanting to share the bed, though.  And since she couldn’t fit IN the bed, she apparently decided the next best thing was to lie ON it.  In doing so, however, she kind of locked Mink in the bed.  I guess she delivered her point.  Sort of.

In the upper right corner of the photo you can see just the nose and mouth of wobbly Claire, who had an entire bed to herself and was quite happy about it.

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I drove to Spokane today to meet a volunteer from the Columbia Basin Equine Rescue group, Megan V., who was bringing a blind mare to us from the Tri-cities area of Washington.  Megan’s group works to save feedlot horses that are headed to slaughter, and they buy the ones they think they can adopt out to new homes.  They call us when they find a blind horse at the feedlot. 

One of Megan’s friends took the photo of Megan and me with Pansy the mare, who is blind from glaucoma.  We had just moved Pansy from Megan’s trailer into our trailer.  You can tell that Pansy isn’t so bothered by the stress of travel that she won’t enjoy a good meal! 

I got home around 7 p.m. this evening, and Alayne had an isolation pen already set up and stocked with hay and water.  I unloaded this tall blind mare, introduced her to her pen, and before we could say "have a nice evening," down went her head into the pile of hay.  Somehow I don’t think she’ll have any trouble adjusting to her new environment.

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I took three-legged Cody in to see our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, today for a recheck on his cancer.  Cody completed his chemotherapy course about three weeks ago, but there were still a few very small remaining lesions at the base of his, um, penis.  Yes, it was a transmissible venereal tumor, folks, which Cody got when he was in Miami.  (See our original post on his cancer diagnosis here.)

We’ve since heard from a veterinary student in North Carolina who had studied at a vet school in the Caribbean, and she said this type of tumor was quite common among dogs in the islands.  In fact, her roommate’s dog had a TVT, and was successfully treated.

At the recheck Dave found a couple of lesions were still present, though they hadn’t grown at all, and the entire formerly cancerous area remained very "quiet."  We’ll have to recheck again in three weeks, and then probably every few months for a year to make sure the tumor is completely eradicated.

Cody, needless to say, did not like the examination at all, but was very stoic and tolerated it just fine.