Rolling Dog Farm Blog

We had our regular delivery of dog food today from our distributor, R & R Pet Foods in Lewiston, Idaho.  They handle the Natura line of premium pet foods, including Innova and California Natural, which is the formula we’re feeding.  We had always wanted to use the Natura products but couldn’t afford the retail prices for the number of dogs we have.  Then R & R took over the distribution for Montana and offered us wholesale prices as long as we bought in bulk with a minimum $500 order … which of course we do!  They also deliver right here to the ranch — that’s their white truck and trailer in the photo — saving us a trip with the horse trailer to the freight terminal in Missoula.

So today’s shipment included 20 bags of the California Natural dry dog food (about 750 pounds) and 15 cases of the canned version.  In the photo you see the bags that are headed over to Widget’s House.  We had already carried the remaining bags and the cases of canned food to our storage shed near the main house.  Total cost of today’s delivery:  $738.05.  This should last us about three weeks.

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Kathryn and I drove to Sheridan, Wyoming today to pick up a blind horse name Luna.  She had just been saved from slaughter by a Denver group called Heavenly Horse Rescue in Aurora, Colorado.  They called us right after they saw Luna at the auction house and asked if we could take her.  Pete Davies, one of their volunteers, hauled Luna from Denver to Sheridan, and we met him here this evening.  Sheridan turned out to be almost exactly halfway between Ovando and Denver.

Luna is missing her right eye, and it appears to have been gouged out.  The eye socket is wide open, and you can see red flesh inside.  The left eye is still intact, but sunk deep inside.  It is also painful and infected, as you can tell from the photo, with chronic discharge and constant squinting.  The rescue group’s vet thinks someone may have tried to gouge out the left eye but didn’t succeed.  It’s hard to tell what happened to it.

We have Luna already scheduled for a vet appointment and eye surgery on Wednesday, so this sweet old girl will soon be in good shape.

Kathryn and I head back tomorrow, but will stop in Billings on the way to pick up a diabetic dog who was impounded from an animal cruelty case involving an animal hoarder.  The Northern Rockies regional office of the Humane Society of the U.S. called us a week ago and asked if we could take this dog.  (Of course, it was not being treated for diabetes.)

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Here’s blind Chance getting his last chemotherapy treatment today.  Our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown, is slowly injecting the drug, Cytoxan, directly into Chance’s vein.  Chance has held up to the onslaught of the chemo drugs much better than our old mule, Lonesome George, whose chemo treatment we stopped early because it was trashing his blood cells.  We did another round of bloodwork on Chance today, just before administering the Cytoxan, and he is holding pretty steady.

We’ll give Chance at least a month off, and in the meantime Bill will consult with the veterinary specialists at Ohio State University who developed this protocol for treating lymphoma in horses.  We’ll do another round of bloodwork at the end of the month to see if there’s any change in the readings.  Based on the results and what the specialists tell Bill, we’ll decide what to do from there.

For now, we’re all relieved that we can take a break from the weekly chemo!

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A delightful couple from Seeley Lake, Montana, Scott and Barbara E., held a raffle to benefit the animals at the sanctuary.  The prize was a beautiful quilt that Barbara had made, with dogs and cats on one side and horses on the other.  The quilt was called ‘Reining Cats and Dogs.’

Scott and Barbara sold 200 tickets at $5 each, and they came by today so we could draw the winning ticket.  We asked Kathryn to do the honors.  As you can see from the photo, we had a lot of interest in what we were doing from Widget, Pappy and … very low to the ground in the back … Callie.

Ironically, the winning ticket that Kathryn drew belonged to Peggy F. in Missoula,who owns — of all things — a quilt store!

Of the 200 tickets, nearly half were sold at our local ‘family saloon’ in Ovando called Trixi’s.  The kind folks at Trixi’s were responsible for selling more tickets than any place else the quilt was displayed.

Thank you so much to Scott and Barbara for this awesome $1,000 gift for the animals!

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Alayne and I were sitting at the breakfast table when we looked over and saw Bailey begin giving his stuffed bear a good thrashing.  I grabbed the camera and captured part of it.  What you’ll see here is typical of this spirited little miniature Dachshund … he might have a screwed up back and he struggles to get around sometimes, but nothing keeps him from having a good time.  Like beating up a stuffed bear twice his size.

Having satisfied his masculine need to show the bear who’s boss, Bailey promptly falls asleep on his victim.  Oh, well.

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This is our ‘legally blind’ mare Lilah getting a bath and some grooming this weekend.  Lilah has a recurring skin problem that causes her to rub her hair off, right down to the skin.  Just when we think we’ve cured it, she has another outbreak … this time on Friday night.  So on Saturday we took her down to Beauty’s Barn, where we have hot and cold running water, and bathed and groomed her.

In the photo from left to right are Laura W. from Helena, one of our faithful volunteers; our employee Kathryn; and on the right our newest volunteer, Melissa B. from Missoula.  This was Melissa’s first day volunteering at the ranch.  Every time Melissa would hit the ‘sweet spot’ on Lilah’s shoulder with the brush, this mare would cock her head and start wrinkling her mouth and nose while her lower lip quivered.  "Oooooh, that feels so good!", she seemed to be saying.

What didn’t feel so good was the 35 cc’s of penicillin our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown, injected in Lilah’s rear end this afternoon.  Ouch! 

I had hauled Lilah in when I went to pick up George at the clinic (see post below).  Bill has been mystified by Lilah’s skin condition, and so far nothing is turning up on the tests we’ve run.  After her latest outbreak Friday night we wanted Bill to see her again.  Bill is starting Lilah on a course of penicillin and dexamethasone, and we’ll see within a week if these drugs help to get it under control.

I said Lilah was ‘legally blind’ because that’s how her vet had described this mare to us when we were first asked to take her.  The vet assured us she really was blind, but we thought it was a bit odd he’d use that phrase.  Well, it turns out Lilah is night blind but in broad daylight can see just fine.  Normally that wouldn’t qualify a horse to come here — we don’t consider that "blindness" — but based on the vet’s word, we agreed to take her.  So for now Lilah serves as the pasture buddy and ‘seeing eye horse’ for her friend (truly) blind Honey. 

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After 8 days at the vet clinic, I was finally able to bring our old mule Lonesome George home today.  He has started to eat again, and our equine vet Dr. Bill Brown thought it would be okay to take him back to the ranch.  We’re still not sure exactly what caused his lack of appetite, and he’s still not eating as much as he should, but he seems to have turned the corner.

In the photo with George is Bill’s vet tech, Vicky C.  She is holding George’s ears forward, because she knows we like to have our equines looking smartly at the camera with their ears forward!  Usually when the camera comes out the ears go in opposite directions.  (Someone please explain that to me.)

Of course, it took both of us to get George out of the paddock and headed towards the trailer.  Vicky pulled and steered from the front while I pushed from the rear.  The mule was strategically in the middle, doing exactly as he pleased.

When I got back to the ranch tonight and put him in his stall, George seemed genuinely happy to be home again … and promptly started eating the hay in his feeder.  That was a great sign.  Soon "George’s girls" — blind Lena and blind Nikki — stuck their heads over the wall from their adjoining stalls to welcome their Uncle George back.  George, however, seemed more interested in his hay than in greeting the girls, and that’s okay with us.

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This afternoon I noticed blind Widget and Birdie, our little Lab with muscular dystrophy, sharing the big dog bed in the living room.  I think what struck me was not just that they were sleeping together on the bed, but facing opposite directions.  And then I noticed Widget was sleeping right on top of Birdie’s tail, with it sticking out from underneath her.  I headed for the office to get the camera.

A few hours later this evening, old Pappy and even older Dillon, one of our ‘personal’ dogs from Seattle, ended up sharing the same bed, although in a completely different way.  That’s Dillon on the left and Pappy on the right. 

We were in the kitchen when we heard Pappy doing his half-bark, half-whine thing … it’s the "help, someone’s crowding me" signal for us to come running.  Pappy does NOT like to share, and he was mortified that Dillon climbed over him to get to the other side of the bed, then turned around and lay down by his side.  (The easier, more logical approach would have been to simply get on the bed from the front, but no, Dillon thought walking over Pappy made more sense somehow.)

Dillon had been terribly abused as a puppy and ended up at a no-kill shelter near Seattle.  He was terrified of people — he would cower and cringe when approached — and no one would adopt him.  Dillon spent five years at the shelter in a small outdoor kennel until we came along.  Now 14, he’s come a long way, but he is still very shy and timid around people he doesn’t know.  Dillon also doesn’t like to have his photo taken, so I had one shot, and this was it!

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Regular blog readers may remember a photo I posted a few weeks ago, showing the dogs all bunched up at the front door to Widget’s House, waiting to go inside for dinner.  Well, here’s what it looks like from the other side of the door.  Beth has opened the back door to Widget’s House and is letting in the crew who spend their days playing in the dog paddock on the south side of the building. 

In the photo is blind Buddy looking for his crate.  Buddy has progressive retinal atrophy but can still see shapes and shadows, so he navigates pretty well.  The black dog in the background is a recent arrival, blind Levi, and the tan dog is blind Cedar.  Behind Cedar is blind Patti, who Beth is guiding over to her crate.  Still to come in the door is Travis, our character with the fused jaw.  All five of these guys came from Washington state. 

It just occurred to me as I’m writing this that we have the Washington contingent in one paddock and the Californians and Montanans in another.  I have no idea how that happened or why! 

We feed most of the dogs in their own individual crates, which gives them a private ‘den’ to enjoy while they dine.  You should hear what that building sounds like once all the dogs are in their crates with their bowls, munching away!  Twenty dogs going "CRUNCH-MUNCH-CRUNCH."  And then, pretty soon, the building falls quiet as, one by one, they finish eating and begin falling asleep.

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"What on earth is that?," you’re probably wondering.  That’s our delightful old mule, Lonesome George, preparing to undergo a dental today.

George has been at Dr. Bill Brown’s clinic since last Sunday.  We had been in touch with Bill throughout the weekend because of growing concern about George’s health.  He has been battling lymphoma and, as regular blog readers know, has been undergoing chemotherapy treatment.  In the past couple of weeks his appetite had diminished, we’ve had a couple of colic-like episodes, and we know from ongoing blood work that he is anemic, too.

So last Sunday, when George passed the 24-hour mark without eating, drinking or pooping, Bill told us to bring him in.  Bill found George had a rock-hard impaction in his intestine, which worked its way out thanks to the hefty doses of mineral oil that Bill poured into him.  But that didn’t bring his appetite back, and George has continued to lose weight.  Every day this week Bill has given George IV fluids and provided other intensive care, yet George has not gone back to being his endearing, mule-ish self.

We had stopped his chemotherapy last week after Bill looked at George’s latest blood work; Bill is worried that the chemo is trashing George’s blood cells, and given his anemia and other issues, we should suspend the chemotherapy until we can turn him around.

I took these photos when I was at the clinic this morning to see how things were going.  Bill was taking another look at George’s teeth, just in case he had worked a tooth loose or had some other dental issue that we didn’t see in the initial evaluation.  The first photo is George in the dental headgear, which holds the equine’s head up and mouth open.  In the second photo Bill is exploring to see if anything’s amiss.  As it turned out, George needed a routine dental (filing or "floating" the teeth, etc.) but had no other problems there.

So the mystery continues. What is so puzzling is that he is bright-eyed and alert, and yet just isn’t eating.  Bill was not comfortable sending George back to the ranch under the circumstances, and I left George there for continued observation and more diagnostics.