Rolling Dog Farm Blog

You may recall that last summer our young Quarter Horse named Copper Kid, a wobbler with a neurological condition called cervical vertebral instability, went down in the pasture late one Friday afternoon.  We managed to get him up on his feet and into the horse trailer, and rushed him to Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula.  Dr. Erin Taylor was waiting for us when I finally pulled up to the clinic at 6:30 p.m.  Erin took great care of Copper over the next few days and has been our equine vet ever since. 

After consulting with other specialists in equine neurology, Erin referred us to Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital for a myelogram and then surgery on his spine.  As it turned out, the myelogram did not reveal the lesions on his spine — this happens in a small percentage of these cases — and thus the equine neurosurgeon was not able to operate.  After three weeks at WSU (the myelogram temporarily made his condition even worse, which we expected) we brought him back to the ranch.

After reviewing the images of Copper’s vertebrae, the equine neurosurgeon had concluded that Copper would not get better without surgery, and that was certainly our view, too.  Yet we had no choice but to simply put him on stall rest, administer plenty of steroids to reduce spinal inflammation, and see if time would help. 

Did it ever!

Copper has confounded us and the experts, too.  His recovery has been dramatic.  This morning we shot some video of Copper when we turned him out to pasture, and you’ll see what we mean.  The only thing we are doing differently for him now is keeping him in a paddock by himself, since we think he injured himself last year by goofing around with the other sighted horses.  He hasn’t had steroids in many months, and only gets a vitamin E supplement with his grain.

Before you watch the video from this morning, take a look at this clip from when he left the hospital last August:

Now, here’s how he is today:

What a difference, huh?

As long-time blog readers know, our blind filly Brynn was born with multiple health problems, but her only real quality of life issue is urine leaking from screwed-up internal plumbing.  Her ureter — the tube that takes urine from the kidney to the bladder — instead is hooked up to her vagina, so the urine pools there and then dribbles out almost constantly.  (I say ‘ureter’ singular because she has only one working kidney.) 

We have to bathe her every day and apply Desitin to her legs to try and prevent urine scalds from developing.  But now that summer is upon us and the days are getting warm, the combination of the heat, her own sweat and the urine makes for a very corrosive brew … and even daily baths don’t completely prevent the urine scalds this time of year.

When she was younger, we took her to Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital twice for surgeries to correct this problem, but both operations — called a urethral extension — failed to fix it.  The anatomy of her ‘private parts’ is not exactly normal in shape or location, which makes this a very challenging procedure to perform on her.

So we waited a year for her to grow bigger before attempting another operation.  The more room there is inside her makes it a bit easier for the surgeon to work back there.  Our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, is also a board-certified veterinary surgeon who has done this procedure before on mares with normal anatomy, and she offered to try on Brynn.

Thus this morning I drove Brynn to Erin’s clinic in Missoula, Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital.  I took the photo above of Erin doing some exploratory work to figure out the best approach.  The green plastic jacket she’s wearing is her "pee protection suit," since Brynn can squirt urine quite a ways.  Or, as Erin referred to Brynn today, it’s about the princess and the pee.

What we found is the scar tissue from the previous surgeries, and it became clear that trying the same urethral extension would most likely fail again.  At the most critical place where the sutures have to hold the extension together — deep inside her — the tissue is too thin and weak to sustain the pressure.  This is why the extensions broke down before, and unfortunately, a year of growth has not altered her internal landscape. 

As a result, Erin tried a different technique, which involved cutting around the end of the ureter to "release" it so urine could flow back towards her bladder.  This is really hard to explain — I just don’t have the anatomical vocabulary, and without you seeing what it looks like, I’m not sure a verbal explanation would make much sense any way.  But her ureter enters the vagina just past a ridge of tissue, and it is this ridge that allows the urine to flow forward into the vagina and prevents the urine from flowing back down to the bladder … which lies behind that ridge.  The purpose of the procedure today was to re-direct the ureter’s flow of urine around the ridge and towards the bladder.  Almost like a dam bypass channel.

It’s too soon to know whether this will work.  I brought Brynn home from the clinic this evening.  Erin thought it might take a week or more before we’ll know for sure whether this helped her or not, depending on how the surgery site heals.

Brynn also had blood in her urine today, which we had not seen in several months.  This means she may have another kidney infection developing.  We’ll have her blood work back tomorrow and will know then what her kidney values are.

At this point all we can do is keep our fingers crossed.

    

Yesterday I had to take several animals in to our vet clinic in Helena, and it was a full truck.  Blind Lady needed a repeat of her Cushing’s test to see if her new medication is working; blind Carmel was in for a follow-up eye exam; and blind Evelyn needed a skin biopsy for a recurring skin condition.  Also along for the trip was blind Shep, our new arrival from Afghanistan.

In the photo at the top our vet Dr. Brenda Culver is listening to Shep’s heart after doing his eye exam.  You can see in the photo how his eyes have that green glow.  Brenda found that he has only the faintest of blood vessels in his retina — when they’re like this she said they’re called ‘ghost vessels’.  It’s not from progressive retinal atrophy, but more likely from a birth defect that caused the vessels to be deformed.  And his optic nerve is barely present.  So with his pupils wide open, the light bounces right back off the retina.

Brenda showed me that when you look close-up with her slit-lamp, you can see what appear to be hundreds of tiny bright speckles reflecting in the fluid in his eye.  It was, oddly, incredibly beautiful to see these little green stars shimmering in the light — if you stop thinking that this is an eye that can’t see.

Here’s another view of Shep during the eye exam:

There isn’t anything we can do to restore Shep’s vision, but his eyes are comfortable and don’t cause him any problems.  Shep stayed at the clinic for neutering and for a neurological/orthopedic evaluation — I’ve watched him walk and it just seems to me that something is not quite right about his gait with his rear legs.  It’s so subtle I can’t put my finger on it, but I wanted Brenda and her husband Britt, a board-certified internal medicine specialist, to examine him and see what they think.  It could be simply a conformation issue because of chronic malnutrition as a puppy before he was brought to the shelter in Kabul.

We don’t have any results on Lady or Evelyn yet, but on Carmel, we are probably going to be taking her to see a veterinary ophthalmologist to determine our next steps for her.  Brenda is working out those arrangements today.

We were astonished when Barbara and Scott Edwards came out to the ranch today for the 3rd annual quilt raffle drawing and handed over a check for a whopping $3,065!  That was three times the planned ticket sales.  We knew the quilt had drawn a lot of interest but we didn’t quite realize how many people had bought raffle tickets from Barbara … and how many people had bought lots of tickets.  Holy cow.  Thank you to all of you who made this raffle such an incredible success and blessing for the animals! 

Alayne, with blind Austin the Beagle assisting and Barbara holding the basket, set about to draw the winning ticket.  And the winner is … (drum roll, please) … Peggy S. of Tallahassee, Florida!  Peggy is a regular blog reader who, it turns out, is also a quilter herself.  When Alayne called Peggy this afternoon to tell her she had won the raffle, Peggy said she knew how much hard work Barbara had put into making a quilt like this.  Peggy said not only was the quilt truly gorgeous, but she thought it was just wonderful that Barbara does this quilt raffle for the animals every year.

And Barbara asked us to thank everyone who had sent her such lovely notes and cards with their raffle ticket checks.  She said she was really touched by the sentiments people had expressed.

Finally, our immense thanks and gratitude to Barbara for doing this phenomenal quilt — what an amazing way to help the animals at the ranch.

Thank you all!

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One of our blog readers asked why we didn’t let blind Callie into the cat house.  I should have anticipated that question when I wrote the blog post!  The reason is because some of the cats would react to an overly friendly and inquisitive Callie by slashing at her face with their claws.  We wouldn’t want her to get her eyes scratched or otherwise hurt.  The cats in the cat house are not used to dogs milling about, unlike our barn cats.  Blind Cinder, for one, actually attacks dogs.  Now that’s fearless!

You may recall that when our old mule Roy recently lost his buddy, blind Scout, he mourned for quite a while.  We began to let him just wander at will across the ranch, which made him happy and got his creaky joints moving.  He also began to focus on his human servants as masseurs, ear scratchers and providers of other useful services. 

But he also started spending time hanging out next to Luna and Hannah, two blind mares whose corral is at the south end of Beauty’s Barn.  When Roy parks himself in the barn aisle facing south, he looks right over their corral.  We didn’t realize to what extent he had bonded with them — even if they hadn’t really bonded with him — until we started taking the horses out to pasture two weeks ago. 

We had taken Luna and Hannah out to their pasture that first weekend, closed the gate, and then took blind Bridger and blind Madison out to the adjoining pasture, which is closer to Beauty’s Barn.  About ten minutes after we closed their gate, Roy walked up to it and started banging on it with his front hooves.  He was looking past Bridger and Madison’s pasture and out to the next one, where Luna and Hannah were.

We opened the gate and he walked all the way across the pasture to the next gate, leading to the girls’ paddock.  He patiently waited until we opened that gate, too, and then he walked through it and off to visit with the mares. 

Ever since, Roy follows the girls out to pasture every morning and back to the barn in the evening.  The funny thing is that he has free access to this pasture any other time he wants it, but he never goes out there unless Luna and Hannah are in it.  He also doesn’t actually get very close to them; he’s content to simply be in the same pasture.

So yesterday morning I videotaped this mule-and-mare procession as Alayne led Luna and Hannah out to their paddock.  Once they got there, I tried to shoot some additional video of all three equines, but as you’ll see, I had an old mule who kept walking up to me, demanding some attention.  This is a 30 second video clip:

This afternoon we saw blind Callie trying to work her way into the cat house, apparently by going under the door.  Now, given her ample girth, this would be right up there as a feat with the Biblical "camel going through the eye of a needle."  But she knew there were cats right behind the screen door, and she could hear and smell them because we had the interior door open … so those cats were oh-so-close.

Callie is fascinated with cats.  Not in an aggressive way, but she has this obsession about them that I think is compounded in part because she can’t see them.  I suspect that makes them more mysterious and intriguing.  She’ll often sit next to the cats’ outdoor enclosure, barking and barking  at the felines on the other side of the fence.  We’ll finally have to call her off for both the cats’ sake and our own.

But this was the first time we’d seen Callie attempting to get through the door like this.  After taking the photo above, I walked over to see who was behind the door … and it was Tibby, the youngster with the deformed legs.  He knew she was on the other side, and I think he was teasing (taunting?) her by scratching and tapping on the door from the inside with his paws.  When I opened the door, he gazed up at me with a "Who, me?" look on his face.

We noticed in the past several weeks that Trooper, our hound mix from Louisiana with the twisted front leg, has developed quite the relationship with Priscilla, the blind Poodle from Texas.  Now, Trooper has had a way with the ladies before, including Blanca, our blind-and-deaf Great Dane.  But none of the girls has swooned over him the way Priscilla does.  She follows him all over the Widget’s House yard, plays with him, romps with him, and in general has quite the crush on him.

We’re not sure why.  She’s kind of upscale, refined, and dignified.  He’s ungainly, long-eared, willful, and up to no good much of the time.  More like the fellow from the wrong side of the tracks.  But she fell for him nonetheless.

She is blind, though, so with apologies to Elvis, maybe she just doesn’t know he ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

 

This is what we woke up to this morning … which was actually less snow than we had yesterday morning!  Fortunately yesterday’s snow melted by evening.  But we were braced for far worse, because the Missoula office of the National Weather Service had issued a Heavy Snow Warning for us today:

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BUTTE/BLACKFOOT REGION-
830 AM MDT WED JUN 11 2008

…HEAVY SNOW WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM MDT THIS AFTERNOON..

TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 8 TO 12 INCHES ARE EXPECTED OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN BY THIS EVENING. THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION AMOUNTS ARE EXPECTED TO FALL OVER THE MOUNTAINS…INCLUDING MACDONALD AND HOMESTAKE PASSES AND GEORGETOWN LAKE. LOWER
ELEVATIONS SNOWFALL AMOUNTS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES…INCLUDING THE CITY OF BUTTE.

A HEAVY SNOW WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS.

—

The horses have shed out their winter coats by now, so this is not what they need.  We had to leave the horses in the barns all day yesterday because it was blowing so hard and the snow was coming in sideways.  Our cottonwoods have all their leaves out, so we have to worry about major tree damage with these June snowstorms.

Fortunately, as today wore on, the temperature began to rise and the snow turned to … thank heavens … rain.  But it’s still a cold, wind-driven rain, which is equally miserable for the horses, so they are back in their stalls for the night.

And here we thought we were done cleaning stalls for a while.

Or splitting wood for the woodstove to heat the house.  Which I’ve been doing every night for the past week!

But, we’ve still come a long way from this scene back in January:

Following Carmel’s eye exam last week, our vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, consulted with our veterinary ophthalmologist, Dr. Bill Yakely of the Animal Eye Clinic in Spokane, Washington.  Brenda had also sent Dr. Yakely some photos I had taken of Carmel’s eyes, including the one above. 

It turns out that Carmel has a corneal dystrophy.  This is a fairly rare condition that includes a number of different types of dystrophies, depending on which part of the cornea is involved.  Some breeds are more disposed to corneal dystrophy than others.  Beagles are more likely to get a stromal corneal dystrophy, which affects the stroma, or thickest layer, of the cornea.  Some ophthalmologists call the cornea the "windshield" of the eye, and there are five layers to it.

In many cases these corneal dystrophies do not cause blindness and are not painful, though Carmel is clearly different.  Her corneal dystrophy has caused a diffuse corneal edema, or fluid, to completely cloud the eye.  She is, in effect, blind from an obstruction.  And her eyes hurt.

Dr. Yakely told Brenda that corneal transplants are not currently an option for the stromal corneal dystrophy, though there is research going on in academic circles on this problem.  So Brenda is contacting a veterinary ophthalmologist at a veterinary teaching hospital who is involved in this research to see what else we could do for Carmel.  It is entirely possible that without the edema obstructing her vision, she could see just fine.

At this point that’s all we know — stay tuned for further updates!

Our beautiful blind mare Lena has, um, a bit of a weight problem.  Or, it might be more appropriate to say:  she has to work harder at maintaining her figure than the average mare.  (I think that sounds better.)  What this means is that Lena is always on a diet, which is easy to manage during the winter when we’re feeding hay.  It’s another thing altogether when she’s out on pasture having free-choice green grass. 

Because Lena has raised the blind foals that come to the ranch and they become part of her little herd, she goes out to pasture with them.  (That’s Cash on the left and Nikki behind Lena in the photo I took this afternoon.)  Since they’re young and growing, they can benefit from all the green grass they can eat … but Lena would end up looking like an equine-shaped balloon.  So this has always been a delicate balancing act, trying to make sure the youngsters get enough time on grass but not enough that their Aunt Lena becomes f-a-t or worse, founders.  They get upset if we leave Lena behind at the barn or take her out of the pasture early and leave them by themselves. 

So when our grazing season started this past weekend and we began taking the horses out to pasture, we were ready with a new way to manage Lena’s diet — it’s called a grazing muzzle.  It’s designed to let a limited amount of grass come through holes in the basket of the muzzle, and has a break-away halter to prevent a horse from getting caught up on a fence with it.  This grazing muzzle allows horses like Lena to spend time on pasture with other horses but avoid the health problems from too much eating.

Lena hated it.

She thought it was a bad, bad idea. 

Yesterday I tried it on her for a couple of hours for the first time.  She walked around the pasture, head up, trying to figure out why we would attach a basket to her face and then leave her with it.  She didn’t even try to graze with it and just paced across the field.  The blind youngsters followed after her, wondering why their Aunt Lena wasn’t grazing.  This was most unlike Aunt Lena, who always has her head down in the grass.  After watching this woe-is-me performance, we felt … well, guilty.  Alayne finally walked out to take the muzzle off Lena.  She glowered at Alayne.  Not even a "thanks-for-taking-it-off, that-was-really-annoying" expression of gratitude.  Just a pouty, sullen look.

Today, Day Two, went better.  We let Lena graze all morning in the rich spring grass, and then in early afternoon we put the muzzle on.  She still spent quite a bit of time walking around — exercise is a good thing for a plump horse! — but occasionally she would put her head down and swish the muzzle around in the grass.  So I think she’s getting the hang of it.

When we went out this evening to bring them in from pasture, I took the muzzle off Lena for the walk back to the barn.  Still feeling guilty, I let Lena stop a couple of times along the way and put her face into some thick stands of lush brome grass and grab big mouthfuls of it.

It kind of felt like stopping at McDonald’s on the way home from the gym.  But at least she was a happier girl at the end of the day.  And that makes for a happier me.