Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Last Sunday Alayne discovered a growth on blind Goldie’s side, near her right shoulder.  It was very small, buried in a lot of other tissue, and it had that "uh oh" feel to it.  Not a fatty tumor, and it felt attached.  This was more alarming than it would normally be, because Goldie had already had surgery for another cancerous growth in January.  That was a soft tissue sarcoma on her back.  Our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick at Missoula Veterinary Specialty Clinic, had successfully removed it.

On Monday I took Goldie in to see Dave, and a fine needle aspirate confirmed our fears.  The growth was a mast cell tumor.  We scheduled surgery for today.

Goldie is one of our ‘personal’ dogs who moved to Montana with us from Seattle in 2000.  She is the chief minion who never lets Alayne get more than 5 feet away from her.  Goldie is a dog who is as much as part of us as any animal we’ve had.  We’ve had her longer than anyone else.

And as many of you know, this has been a truly terrible year for losses for us.  We’ve lost three of our other personal dogs this year … Dillon, Dolly and Shiloh.  Little Oscar died, too.  Then there was the death two weeks ago of our beloved Birdie, who was as much "one of ours" as Goldie.  Add in all the other losses, and it’s been an emotionally brutal year.

So having Goldie develop a second cancer in six months was the last thing we wanted to hear, and this week we have been on edge worrying about her.  I took the photo of Alayne with Goldie this morning, just before they left for the vet hospital in Missoula.

The good news is that Dave called an hour ago to say Goldie came through surgery just fine and was already up and walking around.  He is sending the tissue in for a biopsy, which will tell us what grade of mast cell tumor it is.  They range from 1 to 3, with 3 being the most aggressive and requiring follow-up chemotherapy.  Most come back as grade 2 tumors.  We should have the results by early next week.

Alayne had stayed in Missoula to be able to bring our little golden girl home this evening, and she just called to say that a very happy Goldie was in the truck with her and headed back to the ranch.

Now, of course, we have to get past the post-operative danger zone where things like blood clots can kill them instantly, despite a successful surgery.  Birdie’s death painfully reminded us that just because they came through surgery in great shape doesn’t mean they are out of danger, so our fingers are staying crossed for a while yet! 

Speaking of cats, here’s one who doesn’t get nearly as much blog-time as those manic attention-seekers, Herbie and Honey Girl.  This is Bunny, one of the nicest, sweetest, and prettiest cats I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.  She came to us last year from the animal control shelter in Spokane County, Washington.  Bunny — or Buns, as I usually call her — is just a gem of a cat.  If Alayne weren’t deathly allergic to cats, Bunny would be here in my office right now, sitting on my desk, staring at me.  Or pawing at me with that little stump of a leg, saying "Love me, please."  It is irresistible when she does this.  Since she has to use her right front leg to stand on, she always uses her stump to paw at you when she wants to be petted.  Trust me, when she does that, you melt.  (I think she knows this.)

Bunny gets along with all the other cats, and is a mellow doll of a girl.  How she ended up as a stray — and unclaimed at the shelter — amazes me.  We don’t know what happened to her leg, but like all of our three-legged ones, it doesn’t slow her down at all.

Among Bunny’s many wonderful attributes is this one:  Unlike Herbie and Honey Girl, she is perfectly content to stay inside the outdoor enclosure!

You’d think that a bunch of blind, three-legged and wobbly cats wouldn’t be capable of — or have any interest in — escaping from their nice, safe, outdoor enclosure.  But you’d be wrong.

I was in my office yesterday afternoon responding to emails when Alayne came in and said, "Herbie got out again."  What?!?  We had already fixed the top of the enclosure after his last escape, and I couldn’t believe he had managed to get through it again.  On my way out to see what was going on, I grabbed the camera to document blind Herbie’s latest adventure.

There he was, walking on top of the enclosure, carefully picking his way across the fencing material we lay from end to end to seal it off. Herbie! I checked the edges of the fencing where it meets the wall, because this is how he got out before.  Nope, it was tight against the wall.  I was perplexed.  How did he get out?

I opened the gate to the isolation yard … that’s what is on the other side of the wooden fence in the photo — and found another cat, three-legged Honey Girl, lounging in the sun.  What the @%#?!  I walked over to pick her up and she scampered off.  Around and around we went, me trying to pick her up, she bolting away.  She was clearly enjoying being out.  Note:  A three-legged cat who doesn’t want to be caught is just as fast as a four-legged cat who doesn’t want to be caught.  I finally got her back in the enclosure and then resumed the inspection. 

Finding Honey Girl was the clue, because a week ago we had found her out in the isolation yard, along with wobbly Mink.  She had dug under that board fence, in the one short 18" section that isn’t lined with 4" x 4" posts.  So we had dutifully filled her hole with big rocks and lined that gap with more rock.

I looked over at the original point of escape — by now I was feeling like Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes,  trying to figure out how those pesky GIs were always digging out of their POW camp — and was dumbfounded to see Honey Girl had somehow tunneled her way right past those rocks, pushing them aside and digging a new tunnel.  Bear in mind that this cat only has one front leg!

Herbie, meanwhile, being true to form, had no interest in exploring the ground. No sir, he only wanted to go up … and up he went.  So once he followed Honey Girl out her tunnel, he turned right around, climbed up that board fence, and headed for the top of the enclosure.  Bear in mind that this cat has no eyes in his head!

If he had just climbed all the way up onto the cottage itself, I could have titled this post, "Cat on a hot tin roof."  Dang.

Herbie made his way over to the edge, meowing at me the entire time — I don’t know if he was simply letting me know he was coming over to me, or complaining that the fence material was swaying underneath him.  He got to the edge of the enclosure and I lifted him off with one hand.  He is so nimble and smart … and such a world-class climber … that I didn’t for one minute worry about him falling. 

We have now lined that gap at the bottom of the fence with a board and about 50 pounds of rocks.  If that doesn’t keep them in, well, I guess I’ll have another "blog moment" to report!

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To follow up on the post about Spinner’s seizures:  She is doing fine and has not had any more seizures since last week.  All of her other tests came back looking good.  So we don’t know much more right now. 

I stepped out the back door of our house the other day and saw this scene at the edge of the steps.  That’s Oliver and Twist, the two Dachshunds, sharing a dog cot with blind Austin.  I think there might still be room to squeeze a miniature Dachshund into that upper left-hand corner of the bed, but Daisy wasn’t interested in trying.

Oliver and Twist had come to us from an animal hoarder/backyard breeding situation several months ago.  Oliver, the wire-haired one, has orthopedic problems — including front feet that turn in-ward when he stands — that make him hop instead of walk.  Twist’s left rear leg juts out sideways (except when he’s lying down like this!) from a birth defect.  The leg doesn’t hamper his mobility … he just lifts it up and out of the way, then zooms off.

Austin is kind of like the kid who is everybody’s favorite little brother; all the dogs enjoy playing with him and just having him hang around with them.  These three were enjoying a summer afternoon snooze in the shade of the back porch.

Here’s a different configuration from the other side of the house, in a photo I took last week.  That’s Austin and Twist with blind Kenai, our elderly black Lab.  This was a summer morning snooze under the front porch, and since the temperature was still fairly cool, I think they were using Kenai as a heating pad:

It seems odd to have to post this kind of update on blind-and-deaf Spinner after her happy "dining al fresco" post a few days ago, but we had a set back with her yesterday that was quite frightening.  Spinner started having seizures a few months ago … just a few of them, several weeks apart.  Our vets thought her episodes were spaced far enough apart, and the seizures themselves relatively short-lived, that it wasn’t time to intervene medically.  Usually medical intervention happens when seizures are clustered, long-lasting (i.e., more than a minute), and are of the grand mal type in severity.  So far she met only one of those tests, in that her seizures had been grand mals.

We crossed that threshold on all three counts yesterday.  Fortunately, Spinner happened to be in the house when this occurred.  We were having some trees sprayed in the front yard and had put all the dogs up, so Spinner was inside with us.  I was working in my office when I heard all this thrashing coming from the dining room, and at first I thought it was Austin and Briggs the blind Beagles roughhousing with each other.  No, it was Spinner seizuring under the dining table.  Alayne and I rushed over and pulled her out from underneath, then hovered over her. 

There’s nothing really like watching an animal (or a person, for that matter) have a seizure and feeling so helpless.  As the seconds ticked by, her convulsions increased, and we realized this was another grand mal seizure.  Alarmingly, it went on for nearly two minutes.  Finally, Spinner started to come out of it and her body began to quiet down, but just when we thought the seizure was over … it started up again.  She raised her feet off the ground, pressed her head down, and trembled and shook.  I noticed her right eye was mostly closed, her left one open.  Her body kept convulsing.

I pulled the phone out to call our vet clinic, and shortly I was talking with Dr. Jennifer Rockwell.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have injectable Valium on hand, so Jennifer had me start Spinner on phenobarbital once the second seizure finally quit.  From start to finish, Spinner was seizuring for more than three minutes … which is a long, long time for your brain to be shorting out.

Today Alayne drove Spinner over to Helena so Jennifer could begin some tests.  I took the photo above of Spinner in the truck just before Alayne left for the clinic this morning.  Our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Britt Culver, is on vacation, but he will do a neurological exam on Spinner when he returns.

In the meantime, Jennifer is equipping us with the injectable Valium in case we need to control any more of these seizures.  Hopefully the phenobarbital won’t make that necessary.  As I write this, Alayne had just called to say she was heading up MacDonald Pass from Helena on her way home with Spinner.

Because of this latest episode, Miss Al Fresco now will be spending a lot more time indoors, under close supervision, whether she wants to or not! 

We’ve been really lucky so far this summer … no fires near us, no severe thunderstorms with lightning, and not the same ferocious heat — day after day above 100 degrees F (38 degrees C) — like we had last year.  But today the National Weather Service office in Missoula issued a Red Flag Warning for western Montana and northern Idaho that included us here in Powell County.  The image above is what the map on the National Weather Service Web site looked like this afternoon.  Any time we see all that red on the map we cringe.  The Red Flag Warning  read:

A RED FLAG WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT MDT /11 PM
PDT/ TONIGHT.

INSTABILITY AND MID LEVEL MOISTURE HAS LEAD TO THE FORMATION OF SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS THIS AFTERNOON. THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE REMAINS FAIRLY DRY. THUS THUNDERSTORMS ARE PRODUCING LITTLE PRECIPITATION. GUSTY…ERRATIC WINDS AND FREQUENT LIGHTNING CAN ALSO BE EXPECTED NEAR THESE STORMS.

A RED FLAG WARNING MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EITHER OCCURRING NOW…OR WILL SHORTLY. A COMBINATION OF STRONG WINDS…LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY…AND WARM TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE EXPLOSIVE FIRE GROWTH POTENTIAL.

Last year — ironically this same week in August — I wrote a post about our fire plan and included a photo of our fire trailer.  You can read that post here.

What this means for us is that we brought in all the horses from pasture this afternoon and will keep them safe in the corrals next to the barns for the next day or two, until we see what happens with the weather.  Meanwhile, we’re keeping a close eye on the National Weather Service radar to track developing thunderstorms.  Oh, and we’re crossing our fingers a lot!

Baron, our blind-and-deaf boy who was recently adopted by Wendy M. in Missoula, has won KPAX-TV’s "Greatest Montana Dog" contest … by a landslide!  He totaled 2,102 votes, nearly twice as many as the runner-up who had 1,076 votes.

Wendy sent out an email today to friends and family on Baron’s win and included the photos you see here of Baron at her office.  That’s what I call "hard at work."  Here are excerpts from Wendy’s note:

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Montana’s Greatest Dog: Baron!!!!!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who voted for this precious little dog. A big thanks goes out to Steve and Alayne at Rolling Dog Ranch for posting the contest on their blog, giving Baron a commanding lead!

The representative from KPAX said that Baron was a shoe-in for the Top 10 and the hardest part of the competition was picking the other nine dogs! He was amazed at the support Baron had nationwide and thought all the comments were fantastic….

Baron has become quite the celebrity around Missoula (Stoney too!) and gets recognized everywhere we go. It’s nice to know he has support all around the U.S. as well. Thanks again for giving this awesome dog with special needs some recognition!

-Wendy

P.S. I’ve attached some photos of Baron "the Great" lounging at my work. Getting petted all the time is so exhausting.

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No word yet on whether KPAX will be airing a story to follow up on the contest.  But if they do, I don’t think Baron would be camera shy!

I got this shot yesterday of blind-and-deaf Spinner enjoying the early morning sun.  She is still sitting where we fed her dinner the night before.  That’s one of her favorite places, in the thick grass under the aspen, though I doubt she actually stayed in the same spot all night.  I suspect she got up at some point, wandered around, and came back to it overnight.  But there she was the next morning.  Spinner prefers to stay outside as much as possible in summer, and as long as the nights are warm, she’d rather sleep in the tall grass outdoors than on a bed in the house.  And instead of coming inside to eat, she likes to eat outside, too, so we have to take her meals to her wherever she is in the yard.  It makes us feel like we’re waiters at an outdoor cafe.

Okay, let’s get the hat thing out of the way at the start.  Yes, that’s me wearing my ‘blazing-sun-hat’ … our regular baseball-style caps just don’t keep my ears and neck from getting seared in the summer sun, so after several years of thinking about doing something about it, I finally got a "real" hat.  Alayne says it makes me look like an Amish farmer, so for those of you who remember my babushka posts about Miss Marker and her head-gear, this is your — and her — chance to get even.  Amish-man.

Alright then.  Moving on to the subject of this post….

I will admit to getting excited about a couple of odd things that few others share my zeal for.  One is working our big compost piles and turning a mass of horse manure, stall bedding and hay into rich, dark loamy stuff that looks like Iowa topsoil.  The other "oh-my-gosh-how-exciting-is-this" moment is when our regular shipment of ‘fly predators’ arrives. 

Horse people who visit us have commented in the past about how few flies we have.  Generally, having large animals means having lots of flies because they’re attracted to all the manure.  And although we do still fly-spray our horses (more for mosquitoes than anything else), we have very few flies around the barns and animal cottages — certainly not anywhere near the kind of fly problem you’d expect at a place with this many horses and other animals.

The reason is because we use a biological control called fly predators, which are tiny wasps whose entire goal in life is to find fly larvae and kill them.  They have the same life cycle as the fly, so if you time their release correctly, you can pretty much have these wasps suppress flies all summer long.  They don’t work on all flies, but the common housefly and others. 

We get these fly predators from Spalding Labs, and they arrive every three weeks via the U.S. Mail in a cellophane bag that I’m holding in the photo above.  The bag holds some wood shavings and the brown pupa, or cocoon, that each of these beneficial insects is in at this stage of their life.  The pupa looks like a brown rice kernel.  When they first hatch, they’re as small as gnats, but grow into little wasps that don’t sting or bite or bother people or animals.  They pretty much hover near the ground around manure and other decaying organic material, searching for fly larvae.

When they start hatching, the predators look like this:

And that means it’s time to start spreading!

There are about 50,000 of these predators in the bag, and I walked around this morning spreading them in the corrals and barns and across the yards.  We begin early — in late spring — spreading the predators and keep at it all summer long and into early fall.

Because they do have a certain odor to them, I put on a surgical glove before beginning my ‘predator walk’ around the ranch.  I reach into the bag, pull out a handful of the pupa, and toss them as I go.  Here’s a close-up:

As to why I like these little guys so much … I just think it’s really neat to have a beneficial insect out there controlling flies for you.  Not only is it a healthy and natural way to control flies, it works. 

One of the local TV stations in Missoula, the CBS affiliate KPAX-TV, is holding a contest to choose the "Greatest Montana Dog."  Wendy M., who adopted blind Stoney and blind-and-deaf Baron from us back in June, entered Baron in the contest, along with this photo from Baron’s recent "five steps to a great campfire meal" outing.  Baron is currently leading in the votes, but a yellow Lab is trying to close the gap.

You can vote for Baron on the KPAX site here.

You will need to register, but it’s really quick and takes just a few seconds. You can also vote up to five times a day for the same candidate.  (What is this, Chicago?)

We think it would be wonderful to have a blind-and-deaf dog win this contest, and show lots of people how a disabled animal can make such a terrific pet. 

The contest ends tomorrow, August 5th at 9 p.m. Mountain time.

Thank you!