Rolling Dog Farm Blog

At breakfast we looked over and watched little Bailey methodically pull and twist and finally manhandle (Dachshundhandle?) one of our West Paw dog beds until he got it exactly how he wanted it.  Which is to say, into something resembling a windbreak.  But not only was there no wind inside the house, it wasn’t even blowing outside.  So why he thought he needed a windbreak at 7 a.m. in our living room was something of a mystery.

We frequently watch him tug at these dog beds with his mouth and contort them into various shapes, for no apparent reason.  It’s almost like watching one of those performance artists do their thing in public, while passers-by take in the scene and scratch their heads.  "What is that about?"  That’s kind of how we look at Bailey when he starts manipulating the West Paw beds.  This meets some fundamental need of his, but is not to be confused with his penchant for wrapping himself deep inside blankets and fleece throws.

However, he also likes to bury his head — and only his head — in bedding or under soft toys, as he did here.  So it might be that this windbreak is a modified version, combining both the desire to bury his head with his need to re-shape a West Paw bed to his liking.  Whatever the motive, it was a pretty creative performance for 7 a.m.

Alayne noticed this unusual alignment on the cat tree in the cats’ outdoor enclosure, so I headed over with the camera.  Now, typically when we have the perfect "blog moment," by the time I pick up the camera and get back to wherever the action was, the moment is over.  It’s as if they know I want that photo.  (In my mind I am the cursed photographer, constantly thwarted by uncooperative and ungrateful subjects.  On the other hand, Alayne calls me the "tyrant photographer" because I am never quite satisfied with what I’ve got and always want yet one more shot … as in, 50 or 60 photos.  This is why I am also the cursed photographer in another sense.  But I digress.) 

Well, for this photo I had a split second to get the shot, because I knew one of the three cats would leap off the cat tree as soon as they realized I was standing there.  So I only got one photo, and the horizontal shadow you see is the flash going off against the fence wire. 

That’s three-legged Honey Girl on top, blind Herbie on the next one down, and Fibby on the bottom ledge.  Sure enough, as soon as Herbie heard the click of the shutter, he immediately jumped down and raced over to the fence to greet me.  These subjects never cooperate!

—

In light of yesterday’s post about ever-napping dogs:  When we got up this morning and turned on the satellite TV to watch the news at breakfast, the TV started up with National Geographic — the channel we previously had watched.  The program that was running?  Dogs with Jobs.  I looked at Alayne and said, "See?  They can have jobs." 

While the humans at the Rolling Dog Ranch hustle all day (and evening), the dogs … they nap.  That’s it.  They nap.  Oh, sure, occasionally they’ll run around briefly in the yard, and some of the young ones will romp and roughhouse with each other, but by and large they nap most of the day.

This is one of those odd things, because we’ll let the dogs out of their cottages in the morning (these are the cottages here next to our house), and they’ll go off to do their business, but pretty soon they’re in the house … and asleep again.  Having just been sleeping for, well, at least 8 hours.  I would actually bet that in any 24-hour period, the dogs sleep more than the cats.

So at any point throughout the day, our small house is filled with sleeping dogs.  It’s enough to make me want to walk through the house, wake them up, and lecture them about ambition and the drive to succeed … to point out to them that Rome was not built by sleeping dogs.  But I’m afraid any such talk would fall on deaf ears, as in Stuart above, or they simply wouldn’t see my point, as in blind Callie below: 

(Credit to Alayne for getting these photos this afternoon.)

I was heading out this afternoon to take some photos for today’s blog of the blind horses enjoying a beautiful late summer day on pasture, but I didn’t get past the kitchen.  There was blind Callie grooming blind Briggs, who had stopped playing with his tennis ball while he enjoyed the spa session. 

That’s right, deaf Stuart is not the only groomer we have here.  Long-time readers of the blog have seen other photos of Callie at work, almost always grooming our black dogs.  (For a rare exception to the "black-is-best" rule, see this post.)  And if they’re not pure black dogs, then she’s grooming the black part of their coats.  Since she’s blind this can’t be a color preference, but we’ve never quite figured it out.  So it didn’t surprise me to see which part of Briggs she was grooming. 

As you can see, Briggs sure was relishing it!

Callie typically prefers grooming the back half of dogs, while Stuart is all about the front end, so if only we could get them to offer a tandem grooming service we’d be all set!

On Friday, Cristene and Duane J. from Idaho came out to the ranch to adopt our beautiful three-legged German Shepherd girl, Kasha.  (You may recall Kasha had been adopted last year but that didn’t work out, so she’s been back at the ranch for several months.)  Cristene actually grew up with a three-legged dog, and two of their current dogs are German Shepherds, so she felt a strong connection with Kasha.  Cristene and Duane live in a restored 100-year old farmhouse on a 50-acre place with a lake, wetlands, forest and 3 acres of fenced lawn, so the dogs get to go swimming and obviously get plenty of exercise!

Cristene and Duane spent a lot of time with Kasha on Friday here, and decided she would be a good fit for their family.  In addition to their two Shepherds, Lola and Asa, they also have a Golden Retriever named Jasper and a miniature Dachshund, Arnold, who is — true to Dachshund character — the boss of everybody.  All of their dogs were rescued. 

Cristene emailed us yesterday evening to say Kasha was doing great and adjusting well.  She said, "Her happy, beautiful spirit will bring many smiles to our family and we thank you for that."  However, Cristene added, "Jasper is not very happy because Kasha is faster than he is and beats him to the ball every time!"

I took these photos just before Cristene and Duane left for home with Kasha.  They brought a ramp for Kasha to use to climb into the back of their SUV, and Kasha zoomed right up and settled in for the drive to Idaho:

Thank you, Cristene and Duane, for giving Kasha such a wonderful new home and family to call her own!

Ever since we opened the sanctuary back in 2000, we wanted to have a place where we could exercise the horses and dogs in wintertime.  For us, winters typically last from November through April, with snow on the ground through that long stretch of months. 

The snow gets too deep here to be able to turn the horses out to pasture even for exercise, so for several months the most "turn-out" they get is in their corrals … which is to say, not much.  We had no place to exercise them on a lunge line or ride them.  For the young blind ones like Nikki who we had trained for riding, the training came to an abrupt end when the snow piled up.  Taking several months off from training is not a good thing for a young horse. 

And though the dogs have plenty of room to run around and play in the yards, they’re still on snow and ice in winter — and we wanted to be able to let them run around on dry ground out of the weather.  For the sighted dogs like Travis we could also set up agility courses, and for the blind ones we could set up scent trails. 

In short, it was "life enrichment" we wanted for both the horses and dogs, and the answer was an indoor arena that would become our exercise barn.

Earlier this year we received an unexpected bequest, and along with a smaller grant from a private family foundation, we suddenly had the funds to make the exercise barn a reality.  Our contractors just finished building it a few weeks ago, and there it is in the photo above. 

It’s 70 feet wide and 130 feet long.  That’s on the small end for an indoor arena but it is large enough for our needs.  Although we didn’t have the extra money to install lighting yet, there are "light panels" along the west and east walls — you can see them right underneath the edge of the roof in the photo.  These fiberglass panels let enough natural light in that the building is very usable during the day with no artificial lighting.

It’s not insulated yet because that would have meant another $23,000 on top of the construction cost, and we had already spent enough!  But on a bitterly cold and windy day, it will feel very different inside, just getting out of the weather and off the snow.

So while it’s kind of basic, this exercise barn will let us do what we have wanted to do for a long time — add an entirely new dimension to the quality of life for our disabled dogs and horses.  This will be a very different winter for all of us!

I don’t know what it is about threesomes these days, but we sure seem to have a lot of animals who are snuggling up as a trio.  There were the Beagles yesterday, and last month I posted a photo of Oliver & Twist the two Dachshunds sharing a cot with blind Austin.  I was heading back from Lena’s Barn this morning when our employee Cindy said she thought there was a blog moment in the cat house — one-eyed Lulu was giving three-legged Honey Girl a massage of sorts.  By the time I got to my office, picked up the camera and made it to the cat house, the grooming session was over .. but there was this trio on the window bed.  That’s wobbly Mink on the left, Lulu in the back, and Honey Girl on the right. 

Lulu is one-eyed, which we don’t consider a disability at all.  But in a regular shelter that is already euthanizing half of its perfectly healthy and "normal" cats anyway, being one-eyed is the kind of thing that keeps a cat from being adopted. 

Lulu is a quiet, sweet girl who always seems to be overshadowed by the other brassy and bold personalities in the cat house.  She’s not a ham like Honey Girl (honey ham?), doesn’t have an adorable little wobble like Mink, isn’t pawing at you like blind Herbie, and isn’t meowing her head off like blind Cinder does to get attention.  Lulu kind of just sits there on one of the perching shelves, waiting to be noticed in her own shy way.  But if she’s patient enough, she always gets her share of loving … just after the "me first!" cats get theirs.

Despite the fact that Lulu has been here for several years, I’ve never seen her giving another cat a massage or bath, so hopefully I’ll be able to capture that on camera at some point!

I was in Missoula today, taking blind Goldie in for her second chemotherapy treatment and running errands, when Alayne got this photo of a trio of Beagles in our living room.  That’s deaf Stuart on the left, blind Austin in the back, and blind Carmel on the right.  Austin has this "I know something is going on in front of me" look, while Carmel was sound asleep. 

We have several cots in the living room, and this one is the smallest.  As I’ve written before, for some reason that makes it a magnet for the really big dogs, like blind Kenai, who hang over the edge in all four directions … or it is stuffed full with multiple smaller dogs crammed into it.  Like three Beagles.  It’s yet another mystery of the dog world.

—

Goldie is doing very well with her chemotherapy, and our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, was delighted to hear she didn’t get sick from her first treatment.  That means he still has never had a patient become sick from this particular chemo drug, vinblastine. 

I was really touched by something else that happened at the clinic.  When I walked in with Goldie this morning, Dave’s assistant, Tracy, said "It’s already paid for."  I said, "What do you mean?"  Well, it turns out that a wonderful couple in Missoula who are long-time supporters of the ranch had called Dave to say they were going to pay for Goldie’s treatment today.  That was so sweet … a completely unexpected kindness that we really appreciated! 

I admitted in a blog post back in early August to getting excited about a couple of things — our fly predators and composting.  Well, that blog was all about fly predators, and this one is about composting!

When you have as many large animals as we do — 30 horses — you end up with a lot of manure and stall bedding.  We compost it in long, narrow piles called windrows, then spread it on our pastures as a wonderful soil amendment using our tractor-powered manure spreader.  The reason I get so worked up about composting is because of how incredible it really is.  Lots of tiny invisible microbes break down all this organic matter and over time, turn it into something that looks like rich top soil.  All we need to do is pile it up, keep it moist, and turn it.  Then turn it again … and again … and again. 

Over the course of several months, it goes from looking like this:

To this:

Our employee Cindy took both of these photos this afternoon, when she and I were out turning the windrows with the two tractors.  That small pile in the very top photo is stuff collected from the barn stalls over the summer, so there isn’t much yet … but this will become the "starter pile" that will serve as the heat engine of a new windrow this winter.

Here’s a photo I took of Cindy moving one of our three windrows, this being the center one:

This is the windrow that is the oldest and most thoroughly "cooked."  Today will be the last time we turn it.  Now we will leave it alone to cure for the next several weeks, and it will be the first one we spread on the pastures this fall.  But before we get buried in snow, we will have all three windrows spread on the fields.  And that gives me one more opportunity to blog about compost!

On Saturday morning as our volunteers began arriving, I looked out the window and saw the dogs some were bringing with them — all former residents of the ranch.  I said, "Hey, before you get covered in dog slobber, cat hair and horse manure, let’s get a photo of all of you with your dogs!"

So here are three of our awesome volunteers — long-time regulars — with the dogs they adopted after falling in love with them while volunteering.  That’s Kate W. on the left with blind Luke, who the Missoula Humane Society had asked us to take a few years ago.  Kate and Luke live in Missoula.  In the center is Kate’s mom, Laura B., with wobbly Rudy.  He had come to us from a rescue group in Utah, and had been here only about two weeks before Laura scooped him up and took him home to Helena.  That’s why Rudy never got a page of his own on our Web site — he wasn’t here long enough!  And on the right is Laura W. with blind Levi, who had come to us from a rescue group in Washington state.  Laura and Levi live in Helena. 

Kate and Laura cleaned the cat house and dog cottages in the morning and walked dogs in the afternoon.  Laura W. spent most of the day on the tractor, turning our giant compost windrows.  She took a break from the tractor work to also help us when we took visitors out to meet some of our blind horses.

While their Moms work hard all day here, the dogs … well, they don’t do a dang thing.