Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This is Buzz, a young Golden Retriever who came to us last fall from the Bitterroot Humane Association in Hamilton, Montana.  He had neurological damage of some sort.  Our specialist who examined Buzz determined that he didn’t suffer from any sort of disease or disorder, but had been "clocked" really hard on the head.  As a result, Buzz has a disconnect between his brain and his limbs. 

Often he can’t get his legs and body to do what his brain wants to do, so there is a lag between ‘thought’ and ‘action.’  And sometimes he starts circling and can’t stop until he lays down (as you’ll see in the video below) or we grab him and hold him.  Other times he appears perfectly normal, cruising around looking like a normal dog, as you see in this photo that Beth took this morning.  He is a joyful, happy dog … and a handsome fellow as well!

I took this video yesterday evening … towards the end of this clip with Buzz you can hear some clanging starting in the background.  That was blind Bud beginning to bang his dish in his crate right behind me, so that’s when I turned around and began videotaping his table manners.  I ended up posting that clip last night instead of this one about Buzz.  Here Beth has just given Buzz a kong toy — he loves those things, along with his soccer ball — and then tempts him by tossing another kong across the floor.

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Blind Bud is a delightful dog with some very bad table manners.  No, not the kind you may think of … he’s not food aggressive.  It’s just that when he gets done with his dinner, he has a very unique way of letting everyone know he’s finished.  It’s his own version of "Waiter, I’m done."

I was over in Widget’s House this evening where Beth and Kathryn were feeding dinner to that crew.  We bring the dogs in and feed them in their crates.  This gives them their own private ‘dining room,’ avoids any competition for food, allows the slow diners to eat at their own pace, and helps the short-attention span dogs stay focused on their dinner. 

I was actually taking some video of another dog when I heard all this banging going on right behind me.  I realized Bud was doing his after-dinner routine.  Here it is!

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Our old blind horse Scout has not been doing well in the past few days.  We found him stiff, unwilling to walk, and acting "ouchy."  Our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown, suspects Scout has a case of laminitis, which affects a horse’s feet and makes them painful.  In Scout, the cause is not overfeeding or too rich of a diet — in fact, we’ve had a problem keeping weight on Scout — but more likely associated with a condition like Cushing’s disease. 

Although we tested Scout for Cushing’s last fall and the test came back negative, Bill says the tests can sometimes be wrong.  He decided yesterday to treat Scout for Cushing’s and see if that helped.  We placed a rush order for a special apple-flavored medicated powder from a compounding pharmacy in Oregon and UPS delivered it late this afternoon. 

In the meantime, though, Bill had us start treating Scout with an anti-inflammatory called Banamine to make him more comfortable.  Our task was to squirt the Banamine into Scout’s mouth using a syringe; Bill wanted us to use the injectable fluid version, rather than the paste form, for Scout’s oral dose.  (It avoids having to stick him with a needle every 12 hours, is less expensive than the paste form of Banamine, and is just as effective as the paste.)

Now, Scout is a wonderful, sweet old horse.  In fact, I call him the "huggable horse."  But that doesn’t mean he likes to take his medicine.  And he certainly doesn’t make it easy, as you’ll see in this video I took this morning of Kathryn giving Scout his Banamine.  Kathryn had already gone two rounds with Scout BEFORE the wrestling match you see in this clip.  Although the raw video was nice and crisp, somehow in the compression process for the Web parts of it became blurry … I’m not sure why, but I apologize for the quality in parts of the video.  Still, I think you’ll appreciate what we go through around here!

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This afternoon Alayne took Widget to see Dr. Brenda Culver at Montana Veterinary Specialists in Helena for Widget’s final check-up on her prosthetic eye.  Brenda was delighted with how the eye looked and said it has healed exactly the way it should.  Widget no longer will need her medications or eye ointments.  The biggest and most welcome news for Widget:  Her cone can come off!  After six very long weeks wearing that confounded thing, today was cone independence day! 

In the photo is Brenda on the left and the clinic’s vet tech Michelle on the right.  As part of her array of veterinary diagnostic equipment for assessing Widget, Brenda is shown using a very sophisticated and expensive device called a "dog cookie." 

(Click on photo for larger image.)

Our blind and deaf girl Angel died tonight.  She had just been diagnosed with kidney failure only a few weeks ago, but fluid therapy and medications were not enough.  Yesterday evening she didn’t want to eat any food, and the same again with breakfast today.  Angel suddenly seemed kind of lost and vacant.  This afternoon I talked with our specialist who had been treating her, Dr. Dave Bostwick, and he was going to see Angel tomorrow morning to determine if something other than kidney failure was now involved.  Her downward spiral had been dramatic. 

Not long after I got off the phone with Dave, Kathryn rushed in from the cat house and said, "You’d better come look at Angel."

Angel was lying on her side, unresponsive, her body cold to the touch.  Very cold.  She was breathing — barely — but that was about all.  She was very still, with only an occasional twitching of her head, the kind of involuntary reflex that comes at the very end.  I knew we had already lost her.  By the time Kathryn got her to the emergency clinic, Angel had only a blink reflex left.  Otherwise she was motionless.  The vet at the clinic put her to sleep.

This beautiful white cat with the stunning green eyes was gone.  She had spent her life completely blind and deaf, in a dark and silent world that I can’t even imagine.  For her, smell and touch were awesome senses that told her everything she knew.  What her life was like before she came here we’ll never know.  We’re just glad we were able to give Angel her final couple of years in a place where she was treasured.

You can read Angel’s original story here.

One of our least favorite activities in winter is filling the water tanks for the horses.  With 16 tanks ranging in size from 70 gallons to 300 gallons spread across three barns and more than a dozen corrals, filling those tanks is quite a chore. Especially when it’s, say, 8 above zero.  Our biggest problem is keeping the hoses from freezing when they’re not in use; even though we drain them, there’s always some water left and it freezes hard.  All it takes is a tablespoon or two of water to plug up a 100′ hose.

In Beauty’s Barn we can store the hoses in the heated medical room.  For Lena’s Barn and Scout’s Barn we have no heated storage area, and that’s where the problem is.  So two of our fabulous volunteers from Seattle, Wayne S. and Jan. R., came out this weekend to do something about it.

As you can see in this photo, Wayne is building us a heated, insulated ‘hose hut’ to store our hoses.  (They even bought new hose reels to go with it.)  It’s not quite finished yet … this will have swinging doors to enclose it and an access ramp to make it easier to get the reels into the hose hut.  Wayne brought all his tools from Seattle, bought the materials in Missoula, and worked out of the back of his truck all weekend.

Thank you!

Alayne and I had just sat down to dinner tonight when I looked over and saw this scene:  blind Widget laying on the dog cot, staring right at the fire in the wood stove, with her cone serving as a solar collector of sorts.  (Regular blog readers may remember a recent photo of Widget using her cone as a sonar device.) 

She just loves that wood stove, and often lays on the floor right in front of it.  Sometimes Widget will get so hot she’ll start panting but won’t leave.  We’ll tell her, "Widget, if you’re too hot, move away from the stove!"  (She speaks English.)

Well, eventually her spot on the cot (hey, that rhymes) got too hot (whoa, really rhyming here), and she moved to different parts of the living room.  Finally Widget decided she wanted Pappy’s thick foam bed, but found 90-lb blind Kenai on it.

Widget tried to loom at the side of the bed and intimidate Kenai into leaving, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re wearing a cone on your head.  Kenai ignored her.  So Widget decided sharing was okay after all, and carefully worked her way up and onto the bed.  Notice that little back foot dangling off the edge.

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Beth captured this shot of blind Nikki trying to come in the side door to Lena’s Barn.  Nikki had come to us in 2004 as a blind 4-month foal from New Jersey.  Today she is a gorgeous, stunning filly who is as smart as she is beautiful.  Nikki is inquisitive, affectionate and — let’s be clear about this — downright nosy.

If something’s happening, she wants to be in the middle of it.  If her uncle George in the stall next door is getting medical treatment, you’ll find Nikki leaning over the wall to check things out.  If the farrier is trimming another horse’s hooves, Nikki will be right there, hanging her head over the farrier’s shoulder. 

Thus when she heard Beth open the barn door, Nikki thought, "Hey, maybe something’s going on in there I ought to know about!"  Nikki may be totally blind but she is also completely intrepid, so if Beth had left the door open for much longer, Nikki would have tried to tip-toe her way in.

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Yesterday you saw Travis, our dog with a fused jaw, in jail.  Today he got a complete makeover, courtesy of Kathryn and Beth.  Travis has a stomach tube, and even though we rarely have to use it anymore — he’s learned to slurp his liquid diet out of the corner of his mouth, and he prefers to eat on his own that way — we keep it in for two reasons. 

First, if for some reason we need to resume feeding him through it in the future he’ll still have it, and second, if we have to give him an oral medication, we can always grind it up in a paste and give it to him via the tube. 

He wears clothing to hide his stomach tube.  He pulled his first tube out just by working at it with his lips, and we realized then he needed a shirt or sweater to keep the tube ‘out of sight, out of mind.’  The stomach tube also — this might be more information than you want! — leaks gastric juices around the opening and makes his hair matted and stinky.  So from time to time, we have to scrub down his side and clip the hair around the tube.  That’s what Kathryn is doing in these photos that Beth took.

Although he’s got his tail tucked and is understandably nervous with the power clippers buzzing, Travis certainly didn’t hold it against Kathryn after it was all done … as you’ll see in this video clip.

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We have an open, home-style environment here, where the dogs have big fenced paddocks to run around in during the day.  (The various paddocks range in size from 1/2 acre up to 2 acres.)  In recent weeks the increasing snowpack has been pulling the fences down, providing an opportunity for enterprising escape artists to sneak through and, uh, go AWOL.

In truth, there’s only one escape artist — Travis the dog with a fused jaw.  When this scamp gets out, he takes off and disappears.  The last time he did this, two weeks ago, it was already dark and nearing zero degrees.  A couple of hours later, I finally found him a mile down the road and headed towards the highway.  It was four below zero by then, and yet he had no intention of heading home.  I think he felt like an Arctic explorer of some sort. 

I bundled him into the truck and drove him back to the ranch.  The next morning, rather than turn him loose for the day in the dog paddock, we put him in jail … where he will remain until the snow melts.  So he spends his days here, and at night he’s back inside Widget’s House.

Obviously he’s not too happy about this turn of events, but he makes the most of it.  He spends much of the time standing on top of the dog house in his jail cell, which makes him feel somewhat ‘above’ the other dogs … in spite of his incarceration.  Beth took this photo of the inmate the other day.

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