Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary

Up Close And Personal

When Alayne and I were taking photos for the spring newsletter recently, I had to chuckle when I saw this shot after my camera finished uploading the images to my computer.  Blind-and-deaf Gabe is going to be the "cover model" for this next newsletter, though this is not the photo that will be on the cover!  He continues to do great, and other than the hair growth on his face, you'd never know what he had gone through last year.

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Please keep voting for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in fourth place and still on track to win $3,000 for the animals, but every vote counts!  We just slipped from third place to fourth, so please help round up as many votes as you can so we can stay in the running for the $3,000.  Ask your family and friends to vote for the ranch, too!

Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

Beagles vs. Dachshunds

As soon as I opened the mail yesterday and saw the cover of my March issue of DVM Newsmagazine ("The voice of veterinary news"), I knew there was going to be trouble.  A small headline said, "page 8:  AKC unveils top breeds."  Now, everyone around here knows that Labs always come in No. 1 in these rankings, year after year (19 in a row, but who's counting?), and no one cares.  "Labs, Schmabs," they say.  What the gang wanted to know, of course, is where the Beagles and Dachshunds ranked.  That's the real competition at the ranch.  So I gathered them round the kitchen table and read off the top 10 list, and when I got to No. 5 -- Beagles! -- there was a lot of celebratory woo-woo-wooing.  And then, mercifully, came the Dachshunds at No. 8.  There was a chorus of little barks from way down there near the floor, but it was pretty subdued compared to the Beagle cheering squad.  They were more than a bit worried that they just barely made it into the top 10.  "How can that be?" they fretted.  "We're so cute and have so much personality, and besides, we're easy to pick up and carry!  Just try lugging a Beagle around."

The Dachshunds don't know what people see in Beagles, and vice versa, but at least they can both agree that they should be more popular than the Labs/Schmabs.

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place -- oops, just slipped to fourth! -- putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

I'm Bound To Catch Something With This

I saw blind Widget sleeping in the chair this weekend with her cone pointed up.  I wondered for a minute if she was using it for tanning purposes, like some people do with mirrors to direct the sunlight in a particular direction.  Then I thought maybe she was hoping that if dog cookies started miraculously falling from the sky, they'd drop right into the cone and funnel straight into her mouth.  That way there's no need to have to get up and sniff around looking for them.

Widget is doing great, by the way.  Her eye is healing up just fine from the surgery, and she's her usual bossy self.

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place -- oops, just slipped to fourth! -- putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

I'm Thinking

I got this shot of blind Moose the other day when I was taking photos for our spring newsletter.  Because he always hangs his big head down low -- must weigh a lot, eh? -- it's tough to get a photo of him with his head up.  So I got down low and put the camera down even lower.  I wasn't sure what I was going to get ... but with the kind of digital SLR camera I have, you can just hold the camera out away from you and click-click-click and then see what you get.  Sometimes it's ... well, not too great!  Other times you can have a little bit of photographic serendipity happen and get an interesting shot like this.

Now, if only I had the graphic skills to add in a little cartoon bubble over his head and a line about what he was thinking as I was doing this.... (As in, "Could you please put the stupid camera away and take us inside for dinner?")

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place -- oops, just slipped to fourth! -- putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

And Their Names Are...

Well, it took us a while, and we had lots of great names to choose from, but we finally decided what to call these two adorable little dogs: Spencer and Katie, for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. 

They have settled into a routine here, and have figured out where everything is.  In fact, when we put them outside to go potty, they're back at the door almost before we are (no, really!).  We have to pick them up and put them even farther out, to make sure they do their business before they head back inside.  They are a very smart pair, and though the genetic damage cost them their vision and hearing, their brains are 110%.  And their intelligence is matched by their self-confidence.

So there you have it ... Spencer and Katie.

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This will be the last blog post for this week.  But please keep voting in the Shelter Challenge!

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place, putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

Now I Hear They're Worried About My Kidneys

After blind Helen had a terrible experience with gastrointestinal hemorrhaging last December as a side-effect of her chemotherapy, our vets decided it was time for a "chemo holiday."  It was going to be only for a few weeks, but the hemorrhaging really took a lot out of Helen, and she just wasn't herself.  So we elected to extend her chemo holiday until she seemed to have enough strength back.  Finally, about a week ago, I took her to our vet clinic in Helena for a baseline exam before restarting the chemo.  Amazingly, the chest X-rays showed the cancerous nodules in her lungs had completely disappeared; this didn't mean there was no need for further chemotherapy, but it was proof the treatment had been working better than anyone expected. 

But her bloodwork came back showing that one of her kidney values, the BUN, was elevated.  The oncologist at WSU who's been directing Helen's cancer treatment told our primary care vet, Dr. Jennifer Rockwell, that renal insufficiency can be a side-effect of the chemo drug we had her on, but the elevated BUN could have been from a number of other things, too.  The oncologist wanted us to do an ultrasound of her kidneys to see if there was any kind of tumor there, as well as do a specific type of urinalysis to measure kidney function.

So today I took Helen with me to Missoula to see our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, for an ultrasound and a urine sample.  Dave scanned her kidneys, spleen, liver and other organs and found no evidence of any tumor involvement.  Whew!  It will take several days for the urinalysis results to come back, but based on the ultrasound, we are very encouraged by her prognosis.  Honestly, when we first saw the nodules in her lungs last year, we didn't think she would have made it this far.  

Once we get the urinalysis back, Jennifer will consult with the oncologist again and map out the new course of treatment.  In the meantime, Helen had this to share:

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place, putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!

Outtakes

I've been working on our spring/summer newsletter, and the very last photo I needed was the one of Alayne and me for the "ranch letter" on page 2.  We always have an animal in the photo with us, and we generally pick one that will, well, cooperate!  So we thought Madison would be a great candidate for this photo shoot -- she's an older, quiet girl, very calm and well-behaved.  I figured she'd sit nice and still while our awesome volunteer, Laura W. from Helena, took the photos this past Saturday.

Except ... she didn't.  I don't know if it was because there were all these new and fascinating smells in the hay barn where we were taking the photos, or whether she just had ants in her pants -- but Madison was one squirmy little thing.  She was in constant motion the entire time, and we could barely hold on to her.  So I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the outtakes from the photo session!  In the photo at top, Madison decided she'd rather give me a kiss than look at the camera.

Here it looks like I might be examining her lymph nodes, but I was actually trying to get her to turn her head back towards Laura: 

In this one I've completely lost control and Laura caught me in the process of saying, "Wait, she's going airborne on us..."

We also tried having her sit on the ground, but that didn't really work either:

But finally, somewhere among the 75 photos Laura graciously took, there had to be at least one that would work, right?  And there was ... here's the one we will use in the newsletter:

It wasn't "the" photo I wanted, with her looking at the camera, but I'm old enough and wise enough to realize when it's time to declare victory in animal photography.  Madison was even more relieved than we were that the photo shoot was finally over!

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Please vote for the ranch in the Shelter Challenge -- and you can vote every day!  We're currently in third place, putting us on track to win $3,000 for the animals.  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT, for Montana, and it will bring up our listing.

Vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Last year we won $3,000 in the first round and then won the $20,000 Grand Prize in the second round, so your votes really do add up and make for a wonderful gift for the animals here.

Thank you!