Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I had just driven up to the house this evening from a vet run to Helena when Alayne came out the back door.  She was in tears.  "Sugar just died!  She’s dead!," she kept saying.  I couldn’t believe it.  We’d only had this blind Springer Spaniel for a few months, and she seemed to be in great health.  It was 5:45 p.m.  I raced into the house.

Sugar was keeled over on the dining floor, right by her food bowl.  Alayne was in shock because it had happened so suddenly, just a couple of minutes before.  Alayne had  been in the middle of feeding the dogs their dinner.  She had gone over to the living room to help Sugar off her cot and lead her into the dining room to her food bowl.  Mealtime was the best part of the day for Sugar.  Knowing dinner was coming, as usual she was wagging her little tail and wiggling with delight.  She got to the food bowl, stood there for a second, and then collapsed on the floor.  No struggle, no gasps, no distress.  Just gone.  In an instant.

I checked for any visual response.  There wasn’t any.  I couldn’t find a pulse.  Alayne handed me the stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat.  Nothing.

We sat there by her body for a while, just stunned.  Sugar looked like she always did, but there was no life in her. 

We called our vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, and asked what could have happened.  She suspects, as did we, that Sugar suffered a heart attack.  All the signs point to that as the cause.

Alayne and I picked up Sugar and carried her back to her cot.  We needed to see her there, one last time, the same way she spent every day here.  She loved that cot in the living room.  The photos you see in this post we took soon after she arrived at the ranch.  She had discovered that cot on her first day and this became her spot.  There was no better place.  You can read her original story here.

Goodbye, you sweet old Spaniel.

   

This is blind Levi, who just arrived this week from a rescue group in Seattle.  He had been found abandoned by a highway in eastern Washington, was picked up by animal control, and then scheduled to be euthanized.  Just in time some volunteers pulled him from the shelter and transported him to the private group in Seattle named Rescue Every Dog. 

Debbie W. from Rescue Every Dog e-mailed us and asked if we could take him.  They had not been able to adopt him out because of the "three B’s" — he’s big, black and blind.  Any one of them alone is enough to dim a dog’s adoption prospects, but all three together is a major obstacle.  Once we agreed to take Levi, Debbie arranged to fly him to Missoula.

Debbie, incidentally, is the same person who sent blind Cedar our way a few years ago.  At that time she was volunteering for a shelter in Wenatchee, Washington. 

Levi is a sweet, sensitive boy who just craves attention.  He is confident enough to go exploring on his own, but would really much rather be in your lap.  He’s a bit large for the lap-dog routine at 60 pounds.  He looks to us like a cross between a black Lab and an Akita.  Look at that tail!

I tried to get a close-up of him, but do you have any idea how hard it is to photograph a black dog against white snow?  The camera can’t figure out how to deal with the stark black/white contrast, and yours truly is not enough of a photographer to know how to make the adjustment manually.  (If it goes off ‘auto’ I’m dead.)

(Click on photos for larger image.)

Winter arrived last night with about 6 to 8 inches of beautiful, wet snow.  We knew this storm was coming, so we spent a good part of yesterday pulling all the horses in from pasture, installing heaters in their water tanks, and getting stalls ready.  When we got done late yesterday evening, all the horses were snug in their barn stalls or their run-in sheds.

I took these photos at dawn this morning.  The first shows several of the barns and run-in sheds, looking southeast from the house.  The second is of Widget’s House, our main building for disabled dogs, looking northwest from the house.

Tonight the National Weather Service is forecasting temperatures as low as 7 to 13 degrees, so it will be brisk indeed!

(Click on photos for larger image.)

I caught our little blind puppy Ashley last night snoozing in her favorite spot, a soft round bumper bed that fits her perfectly (but not for long, she’s growing like a weed!).

Each time I took a photo, her expression would change. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she knew I was there, and she could hear the click of the shutter.

I couldn’t tell if she could detect light from the flash, or if she was responding only to the shutter noise.

But each time the camera went off, she’d give me a different look.  You could tell she was wondering, "What is he doing???"

This little puppy has turned out to be a very bright girl.  You can see her really thinking as she navigates her way around the house and yard.  And she has  astonished us by how fast she has mapped her environment.

We’ll take her outside to pee, and we are back in the house for no more than a minute and she’s already at the door, barking to be let in.  Now, mind you she has to find the walkway first, then the steps, and then make her way up them before she gets to the door.  All this in complete darkness.  In 60 seconds or less.

Here’s a photo I took tonight, just a few minutes ago.  We were starting to herd the dogs out the door to start the bedtime process, and I looked over and noticed blind and deaf Spinner sleeping without a care in the world.  There is one (and only one) advantage to being blind and deaf, and that is you can always get a good night’s sleep.

Here we were, milling around the living room, dogs headed to the door, I’m clapping my hands to encourage the slow-pokes, and Spinner is oblivious to all of it.  I finally had to touch her head with my hand to wake her up.

She is doing fine back here at the ranch.  She just isn’t sure what the trip to California was all about.  And it’s not like she got to SEE anything, you know?  I’ve been trying to think what that trip would have been like for her … all the different smells along the way, what it must have felt like when the airplane took off and landed, and what she was thinking at the time.  Minute by minute, the only real indicator she had about everything happening was what her nose was telling her.

Yet, as you can see, she came through it without a hitch.  She was a wonderful little traveler.  But much happier to be home, of course!

The Deputy County Attorney for Cascade County in Montana — Great Falls is the county seat — called today to see if we could take a blind horse caught up in a large-scale animal cruelty case.  A couple has nearly 140 dogs, 17 cats, 17 horses, and other animals.  Many of the dogs apparently are pretty much running free in large packs on the property.  The blind horse is penned in an enclosure fenced with barbed wire … which is of course the wrong fencing for a blind horse.

We agreed to take the blind horse, but we may not be able to go and pick it up until after their trial on Nov. 23.  We also offered to help if they found any of the other animals were disabled.

You can read an article on the case in today’s Great Falls Tribune here.

For an earlier article from the Tribune with more details about the animals’ living conditions, go here.

This case has been going on for months, as you’ll see from the articles.

A few years ago a court in Ravalli County (in the Bitterroot Valley) asked us to take a horse from an animal neglect case while the defendant went through the judicial process.  We picked up the horse in January that year, the trial was in July, the owner was convicted, then appealed, and by the time a plea-bargain was reached and the court gave us custody of the horse, it was December.  The horse, a sighted Paint mare named Patches, is still here at the ranch today.  She’s a sweet, loving girl who can’t be ridden because of a lameness issue, so she’s your classic ‘pasture ornament.’  She’s also a flirt with visitors.

I just got back to the hotel room with Spinner, and I’m sorry to report that our blind and deaf dog is … still blind and deaf.  At least for now. 

The eye surgeon was not optimistic when he called immediately after the surgery today.  He had found that her right eye was shrunken in size and abnormally shaped, a condition known as microphthalmos.  It’s non-visual.  After cutting the fibrous tissue holding that eyeball in its rotated and down position, it did not ‘float’ back up to where it would normally be.  We still see white when we look at that eye.

Her left eye did rotate up, although not all the way.  That’s the good news.  Unfortunately, the surgeon found this eye compromised by a big cataract.  Aaaargghh!  He could not do cataract surgery because that procedure requires an electro-retinogram to determine whether the retina is firing; if it isn’t, surgery isn’t an option.  And even if the retina is working, cataract surgery requires a week’s worth of pre-operative ocular medications to get the eye ready.

Spinner bumped her way through the doorway and into the hotel room, and then bumped into all the furniture as she made her way around.  I tried a ‘menace response’ test on her left eye — by suddenly waving the hand rapidly towards the eye, which in a normal eye results in blinking — but there was no response. 

There might still be some hope.  She may have some peripheral vision in the cataract eye that will become apparent in the next few days.  The surgeon said it could take a while for the eye and brain to adjust to the re-positioned eyeball, and if so, that’s when we may detect some peripheral vision.  We will also have that eye evaluated to see if she might be a candidate for cataract surgery.

But for now … well, we’re clearly heartbroken.  We had hoped to give this sweet dog the gift of sight today.  It doesn’t look like we succeeded.  But at least we tried.  And that’s all we can do.

Thanks to all of you who have posted such wonderful, encouraging comments about Spinner’s surgery.  I wish I could give you better news tonight.

We go back to see the eye surgeon in the morning for a follow-up, and then head to the airport for our flight to Seattle and then on to Missoula.

(I did not post photos of Spinner tonight because her eyes are bloody and look kind of icky.)

Spinner had her consultation this morning with Dr. Tony Basher, the veterinary ophthalmologist and surgeon here in San Diego, and she is now scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning.  Because he had not examined Spinner personally, we needed to get through this ‘checkpoint’ to make sure she was a viable candidate for the surgery.

Dr. Basher will basically cut the tissues that are holding her eyeballs down in their locked position, where they are rotated towards the bridge of her nose. 

There are still a lot of unknowns.  Will her eyeballs ‘float’ back up to normal position after the tissues are cut, or will they move only a bit?  If they rotate back to normal, or close to it, will they remain that way forever?  Will her eyes still work well enough for her to see? 

I took the first photo of Spinner in the exam room.  She was cocking her head because this was the third photo I took with the flash, and she seems to detect it when the flash goes off.  (Similarly she seems to ‘see’ the beam from a flashlight shining on her face at night, enough to react to it.)  This gives us hope that she really is visual enough that if we can only rotate those eyeballs back to a normal position, she’ll be able to see.

She is highly reactive to smells, as Dr. Basher and his assistant Amy learned soon after I took the photo.  He finished his exam and started washing his hands in the sink.  Suddenly Spinner leaped up off the floor and burst into motion, barking madly with her high-pitched little barks.  This startled both Dr. Basher and Amy, and they looked at me, puzzled by her behavior.  I explained what had happened:  When Dr. Basher began washing his hands, Spinner must have smelled the soap from the sink, and this entirely new ‘input’ to her senses set her off.

None of us humans could smell the soap in the air, but this dog with her incredibly refined nose could.  And when you’re blind and deaf, your nose is all you have to work with.  It took us a few weeks after Spinner first arrived to realize that smells in the air triggered her, just like a ‘normal’ dog would react to new sounds or sights by barking.  Often we can’t notice the smells she can, so it looks like she’s just having a spontaneous outburst.  But there’s something in the air, and she knows it.

The second photo I took of Spinner on the lawn outside our hotel room when we got back from the hospital.  She spent the rest of the day lounging by the patio, while I worked on the laptop  (thank heavens for wireless Internet).

I’ll update tomorrow on the surgery!

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Montana, Alayne reports it’s been snowing all day!

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Spinner and I made it to San Diego this evening.  I took the photo of Spinner in the hotel room, soon after we arrived.  As I write this, she is sleeping on the patio outside the room.  This being San Diego, I had dinner on the patio about half an hour ago, looking up at a palm tree while I enjoyed the warm (70 degree) evening outdoors.

What a difference a few hours of travel makes … this morning we woke up to a light dusting of snow in Montana, and when we left, it was 41 degrees at mid-day.

Spinner was quite scared at first at the Missoula airport.  Being blind and deaf, new environments can be very stressful for her.  The TSA security guy at the airport had to examine Spinner (say what?), so I had to take her out of the crate.  At first she slinked on the ground, cowering, until Mr. TSA put his hands on her.  Then — "oh, that’s better!" — she promptly rolled over for a belly rub.  (Canines long ago figured out the art of human manipulation.)

I watched her load at Missoula and then unload in Seattle, each time with a lump in my throat.  I couldn’t see her load in Seattle.  When they closed the doors on the plane to San Diego, I realized they hadn’t given me the slip of paper that told me Spinner had loaded too … so I frantically waved down the flight attendant.  (I earlier had told them I had a dog traveling on the flight.)  By this time the plane had pulled away from the gate, and I’m thinking, "uh oh, she didn’t make it."

The flight attentant scurried to the flight deck, checked with the pilots and ground crew, and came back to confirm that Spinner was in the cargo hold.  Whew. 

When the Alaska Airlines cargo person brought her out to me at the bustling San Diego airport, all I had to do was blow through the crate door on to her nose, and she wiggled with delight. "There you are!", she seemed to say.

I didn’t know what traveling with Spinner would be like.  After getting a bit stressed out this morning in Missoula, she has settled down a lot.  She is quiet, loves to explore, and I think has come to see this as a big adventure now.  Tomorrow we find out if she is a candidate for surgery to restore her vision, and if she is, then the big day is Tuesday! 

This is Buzz, a young Golden Retriever that the Bitterroot Humane Association in Hamilton, Montana, asked if we could take.  They told us he has the ‘wobbles’ … a little unsteady on his feet, falls down sometimes, but is otherwise healthy and happy.  We had not seen Buzz yet, but based on what the shelter told us, we wondered if he didn’t have a mild form of cerebellar hypoplasia.  Our dog Allie and our cat Wobbles have full-blown forms of that condition.  We asked the shelter to take him to our specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, for an evaluation.

Dave did an exam and concluded that Buzz’s balance and mobility issues were NOT from cerebellar hypoplasia.  It is more likely he suffered some kind of head trauma in the past.  A sure sign he has a more classic neurological problem is the fact that he circles quite a bit.  Allie and Wobbles, for instance, don’t circle at all.  Yet he also has far more control over his fine motor skills than they do.

As you can see from the photos, he does quite well standing up.  He can run around the yard just fine.  But then all of a sudden he’ll start listing to one side … he’ll turn his head in one direction … and then he’ll circle for a brief moment.  Occasionally he’ll list like a sinking ship and then fall over.  Other times he just can’t stop or turn in time … it’s like his brain signals can’t get through to the rest of his body … and he’ll run into something. But most of the time he can run, jump, and play like any dog. 

When I was taking photos of him this evening, I watched him move at a fast clip across the yard, heading straight toward some logs ringing a small tree sapling.  I could tell he wanted to stop but couldn’t, and he plowed straight into the logs.  (There’s a reason we protect small trees here.)  When he gets very excited, he has less control and is more likely to lose his balance. 

He is a very sweet, affable and playful boy who gets along with everyone else.  He’s also drop-dead gorgeous. Today was his first day at the ranch and he loved exploring his new environment.  Most of the time he seems quite normal, until … thunk! … you realize something’s not quite right with him!

One final comment:  We need a new name.  Buzz just isn’t him.  Suggestions welcome!

(Click on photos for larger image.)