Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This is how our new arrival, blind Madison, often greets us at the gate to Widget's House — literally jumping for joy.  You'd think for a little old lady this would be a bit too much activity, but she will jump over and over again until we come through the gate.  It may be hard to tell from the photo, but she is probably nearly a foot off the ground with her back feet.  Madison is one very happy, very sweet girl who gets along great with everyone. 

On the far left is our other old lady, Samantha, then Priscilla in the back, Cedar the husky mix, Penny up front by the gate, Molly behind her, and our hound dog, Trooper, behind Madison.  Except for Trooper, all of the dogs in this photo are blind.  (The rest of the dogs who live at Widget's House are either on the porch or in the other three yards around the building.)

This is the core group of "gate greeters" who then follow us as a moving scrum as we make our way to the front door of Widget's House.  As you can see, it's quite a distance to go with a large pack of dogs swirling around your feet!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3, and that means a $3,000 grant if we can hold that spot!  Please keep voting — thank you!

This is one of those "accidental" shots you take but don't realize you've got a beautiful photo on your hands until you upload it to the computer.  Alayne took this photo the other evening while photographing blind Austin hiding in his hole under the pine tree.  While she was shooting, little Bailey had been scooting around the yard and just happened to wander into this particular shot.  Between the colors and the framing, it almost has that "artiste" quality to it.  (Click on the photo to see a larger version.)

This time of year Bailey turns us into the proverbial doorman at the Hotel Rolling Dog because he is always wanting to go out, then come in, then go out again.  He'll be inside for 10 minutes, then decide he just has to right-now-this-very-minute-absolutely-have-to-go-out again.  And the later it is in the evening, the more frequently he wants to bolt outside.  But this time, at least we got a nice photo out of it!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3, and that means a $3,000 grant if we can hold that spot!  Please keep voting — thank you!

When our equine vet Dr. Angela Langer was out here last week doing dentals on the horses, I had asked her to draw blood on blind Hawk so we could run a CBC and chem panel on him.  Alayne and I had noticed Hawk just didn't seem himself; a little stiff, lying down more than usual, but nothing dramatically different — and hard to know if the changes we were seeing in him were just because of his advanced age (late 20s) or due to something else.  We couldn't put our finger on it, but we figured blood work was the place to start.

On Saturday morning, our lead equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, called to say she had just received Hawk's lab results.  She said that while the rest of his blood work looked fine, his potassium levels were significantly elevated and completely out of whack with the other results.  Basically, it was a puzzling finding because it wasn't clear from the blood work why his potassium levels would be so high — but high potassium levels could ultimately result in muscle rigidity and other major problems.  Erin said it could also be the first indication of a kidney problem developing, though his kidney values were perfectly normal.

She wanted us to start him on daily injections of lasix, a diuretic, to help "wash" the potassium out of his blood stream.  The injections need to be given intravenously, directly into his jugular vein.  Alayne took this photo of me giving Hawk his dose this morning.  We're going to keep on lasix for several days, tapering him off, and then re-test his blood work.  You can see from the photo just how big he is, but he has a jugular vein to match, making it easy to find!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Last week I posted some photos of blind Austin doing his usual trick of hiding at bed time by lying in a deep, grass-covered hole in our yard.  Well, I hitched up the big mower to the tractor a few days ago and started cutting the pasture grass around the house.  

This weekend Austin thought he would give his hideout another try, but alas, this time it was hard to miss the Beagle-in-the-hole.  Drat, foiled again.

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Late last week our equine vet, Dr. Angela Langer, came out to do dental work on our horses.  (Angela is a colleague of our primary equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula.)  In these photos she is "floating," or filing down, sharp points on the teeth of blind Bo using her DeWalt "PowerFloat" equine dentistry tool.  Assisting Angela is Amanda A., a visiting vet tech student from Chicago who is doing an internship at the clinic this summer.  Just like people and animals like dogs, horses need regular dental exams and periodic work.  

In this next photo, here's Angela's view of the procedure:

In the background is blind Rosie.  Her ears are back because she doesn't like the sound of that power tool filing down Bo's teeth!

And if that photo wasn't a close-enough view for you, here's another:

Finally, here's a shot in which Bo looks like he's about to eat Angela's hand:

 

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Alayne got these photos of blind-and-deaf Spinner late yesterday enjoying the smells of a warm spring evening, when everything is green and lush.  Like all the dogs, she loves this time of year, but because her nose is more powerful and sensitive than the average dog's, the spring smells must be an even richer environment for her.  She delights in sitting outside and soaking it all in.

This is her classic pose, nose up … then she starts moving her head around to see what else she can get from the air.  Here she is now pointed south:

Then east:

And finally, after detecting Alayne's presence, right at the camera:

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Note:  One person had commented yesterday on the blog that she thought we were at No. 4 and had been for the last week, but I think she was looking at the list of weekly winners.  We continue to get results each time we vote showing us at No. 3, as are other people.

Alayne was looking for blind Austin yesterday evening to put him up for the night in Kelly's Cottage, but there was no Austin to be found.  Unfortunately for him, Alayne remembered this routine of his from last summer and knew exactly where to find him — hiding in the tall grass near a pine in our yard.  Sure enough, there he was!  Close up, and with the bright light of the flash, you can tell a Beagle is inside all that grass.

But from a few feet away, here's what it looked like:

When Austin starts doing this, I know it's time to hook up the mower to the tractor and begin cutting the pasture grass around the house!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Wendy M. of Missoula, who adopted blind Stoney and blind-and-deaf Baron from us last year, emailed me these photos this morning.  She had family over to visit recently, and as you can see, Baron was getting plenty of love!  (So did Stoney!)  I've mentioned before that there are these myths that blind dogs, deaf dogs, and especially blind-and-deaf ones, aren't good with kids.  The truth is that whether a dog is good with children has everything to do with the animal's individual personality and nothing to do with the disability.  That's why there are perfectly "normal" dogs who are snappy with children.  But somehow these myths manage to persist.  So we are always delighted to see the kinds of photos that Wendy sent, showing her nieces and nephews making all over Baron — and this blind-and-deaf dog just lapping it up!

Meanwhile, after getting her share of attention, Stoney zonked out on the couch:

And that gave Baron the opportunity to steal Stoney's bone, which is almost as big as his head:

As they say … means, motive and, yes, opportunity!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

Alayne got this shot of Daisy running through the grass outside our house yesterday morning.  I say she's "running" although it's more like how a really fast turtle would move because of her spine problems.  When Daisy walks she has a distinctive clump-clump-clump sound to her gait — the shelter she originally came from in Utah had named her "Duckie" because of the way she walked.  But whether it's a waddle, a shuffle or something else, you can see from the photo that Daisy can get up enough speed to make her ears fly!

—

Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!

A shelter near Boise, Idaho, contacted us a couple of weeks ago to ask if we could take in an older, blind female dog named Madison.  She had been picked up as a stray back in April.  The shelter's adoption coordinator, Debbie B., told me in an email, "No one has claimed her and we haven’t had anyone interested in adopting her."

Debbie described her as "real sweetie," and said:  "I don’t think her tail ever stops wagging!  We would love to get her to her forever home as she is so deserving.  We named her Madison and below are pictures of her.  If you have availability, we are wondering if you would be in a position to take her in and give her or find her a good home."

We agreed, and then the next step was to work out travel arrangements.  Boise is a long way from the ranch, so we arranged to meet them half-way in Idaho Falls on Friday.  One of the shelter's volunteers, Haley S., was kind enough to drive Madison out from Boise, and Alayne met them in Idaho Falls around noon.  She got back to the ranch with Madison early Friday evening.  I took the photo above of Alayne with our new arrival this afternoon.

Madison is a Chow mix, though we aren't quite sure what else she may have in her.  She is a very sweet girl, and is definitely up there in years — probably about 9 or 10, we think.  That's a very gray muzzle you see in the photo!  She looks bigger in the photo than she actually is; she's more like blind Samantha's size — about knee-high and 40 lbs or so.  My 'educated guess' — judging from the appearance of her eyes — is that she is blind from progressive retinal atrophy, but we'll know more after she gets her eye exam with our vet, Dr. Brenda Culver.

Please join us in welcoming Madison to the ranch!

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Don't forget, you can vote every day for us in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge. 
Enter
"Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana,
and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Invite your family and friends to vote, too! 

Wow .. still No. 3!  Please keep voting — thank you!