Rolling Dog Farm

Patti's Diagnosis

It was just over a week ago that Alayne and I had been talking about blind Patti's remarkable health -- since her initial eye surgery after coming to us way back in 2003, we couldn't remember another trip she made to the vet clinic other than for routine care like dentals.

Maybe we shouldn't have said anything.

Last Sunday evening, as I was bringing Patti into the house for dinner from her yard, I noticed she wasn't her usual bouncy, springy self -- she usually bounds through the gate and twirls, happy to be going in for supper. But she almost meekly went through the gate, as if she didn't have any energy. I had to take her by the collar and guide her up the ramp to the back door. A few minutes later it was clear she wasn't interested in eating. The next day she seemed better; her temperature remained normal, there was never any vomiting or diarrhea, and no outward signs of anything wrong. Just not her usual energy. The only other odd thing we noticed on Monday was that she wasn't lying in her favorite spots in her yard, but was picking some unusual locations. Something wasn't right.

I called our vet clinic in Whitefield for an appointment; they didn't have any openings until Wednesday, but we could drop her off on Tuesday morning and our vet, Dr. Chris Plumley, would take a look at her in between other appointments. Only a few hours after Alayne left her at the clinic, Chris called. He had already managed to do an abdominal ultrasound and found a large mass on Patti's spleen. He could operate to remove her spleen, but he cautioned that he couldn't tell from his ultrasound whether the mass had spread elsewhere. If it had, we might be putting her through surgery unnecessarily. The mass could be benign and limited to the spleen, or it could be cancer and might have spread throughout her abdomen. 

I told Chris I wanted to take Patti to our internal medicine specialist in Burlington, Vermont, Dr. Bryan Harnett, for more detailed diagnostic imaging. My hunch was that we weren't looking at a benign mass limited only to the spleen. I didn't want to have her opened up, only to get a call while she's on the operating table, saying they had found other organs were involved and we probably shouldn't wake her up from anesthesia. (We've been in that terrible situation before.)

In the meantime, I asked Chris to go ahead and run a full blood panel on Patti, so I could have it ready for Bryan's consultation. I called his clinic for an appointment, and Bryan's first opening was Thursday morning. When Alayne went to pick up Patti and brought home her blood work, I took one look at the results and thought, "uh oh." Several values were off-the-chart low.

I scanned the blood work in on Tuesday evening and emailed it to Bryan. I told him that I had an appointment with him for Thursday but thought he should see the lab results in case he decided we should do anything different before then. At 8 p.m., he emailed back, asking us to bring in Patti as soon as we could on Wednesday and he'd fit her into the schedule.

So on Wednesday morning, we bundled Patti into the back seat of the truck and Alayne headed to Burlington with her. Alayne took the photo above of Bryan doing a physical exam on Patti.

With his advanced imaging, Bryan was able to determine that the mass had spread throughout Patti's abdomen -- to her liver and intestines, including the mesentery, the tissue that connects parts of the small intestine to the back wall of the abdomen. She was, in fact, riddled with multiple masses. He concluded that this was most likely hemangiosarcoma, a cancer that is so aggressive that she could have developed it only within the past two weeks ... but certainly within the past two months. 

There was, in short, nothing we could do for her at this point except keep her comfortable with pain meds. The episode of lethargy we saw on Sunday and Monday, Bryan said, was probably from one of the masses rupturing; as her body reabsorbed the blood and fluids, she began to feel better -- and indeed, the rest of this week she's almost been her old self. She's eating, her tail is wagging, and she looks downright happy ... just as she did right up until last Sunday.

But this will be a repeating cycle, and we may only have a couple of weeks left before having to let her go.

For the girl who's been the picture of pefect health for so many years, we were stunned at the sudden reversal of fortune. Long time blog readers know that she has been one of our "icons" here. She came to us after suffering unimaginable pain and abuse, but through her very sweetness and affectionate nature, she showed us how animals are immensely capable of forgiving -- if not forgetting -- what people have done to them. 

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Okay, So It's Not A Cot

When we moved here last year we knew there was a septic tank and field out there "somewhere" under the dog yards, but there was no access to the tank -- everything was totally buried, so we had no idea exactly where it was. I know this is fairly common, but given the fact that septic tanks need to be cleaned out every several years, I've never understood why they aren't all installed with a visible, easily accessible hatch. The alternative is to grab a shovel and start digging around, hoping to find it a foot or so underground. At the ranch in Montana, we had three septic tanks installed over the years (because the buildings were too spread out to share a single one), and our contractor who put them in always put in an above-ground hatch to make access and cleaning very easy.

So when we finally found the one here and dug it up a couple of months ago to be cleaned, I had the septic contractor install a hatch cover so we wouldn't have to enjoy another treasure hunt a few years from now. The dogs have completely ignored this new object in the yard until a couple of days ago, when I saw blind Allie using it a bed and blind Louie curled up against it. I had worried that Allie, who loves to chew on things -- the harder the better -- might consider the hatch an oversized Kong, but so far this is the only engagement I've seen. We do try and keep her occupied with real Kongs at all times!

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Outtakes ... October 2011 Version

We were taking photos for the "farm letter" for our winter/holiday 2011 edition of the print newsletter yesterday, and as usual, I thought you would enjoy seeing the outtakes. Kate was behind the camera, her usual sweet, patient self, while the subjects (Alayne and me and blind Cash) were in front of the camera struggling to maintain control. In all, she took 64 photos before I declared victory -- of those shots, only two were candidates for the final newsletter photo. (I know, I am par-tic-u-lar.)

In the photo above, it looks a little like I'm holding up a disembodied horse head ... or maybe a horse head balloon. Not sure.

Next we have a horse head growing out of Alayne's shoulder:

Here I was apparently doing an impromptu ear inspection (but why?):

In this next one the horse looks great, the woman looks great, and I ... well, I do not look so great:

If I hadn't screwed that one up, we could have stopped there at No. 38.

I was on a roll, it seems, because in this next shot everyone looks really good except for ... well, oh never mind:

So then we switch sides, but here Alayne is trying to control a certain horse head which is moving into her personal space:

The horse succeeds anyway while she bravely continues smiling:

And this last photo was just a complete disaster (although the horse looked pretty good, I must admit):

Finally, here's the one that will be in the newsletter:

Whew!

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Making Friends. Or Not.

Little Irene has been busy making the rounds, checking out potential boyfriends left and right. She may be tiny, but she's brash and bold, and some fellows prefer the kind of girl who is a little more discrete in her affections. Fuzzy, for instance. Irene just can't get enough of him, but he's already had plenty of her, thank you very much. She's too pushy for his tastes. In this series of photos I took the other day, his body language says it all.

After the play bow above failed to get Fuzzy's attention, she began trying to whisper sweet nothings in his ear:

Only to be met with this "um, no thanks" turn of the head:

Better luck next time, kid.

---

Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Somehow This Doesn't Feel Right

You think it wouldn't be hard to keep your basic, sturdy dog cot in the correct, upright position. Except, well, it is. It seems we are always turning them back over. The dogs' motto on some days appears to be, "Have cot, will flip." But until the other morning, I'd never seen a dog actually using an upside-down cot for the intended purpose -- but there was blind Buddy, curled up and sound asleep on the cot ... flipped over on the ground. By the time I came back out with the camera, wobbly Soba saw me heading down from the house and began barking excitedly, and that woke up Buddy. When I finally got to his yard and stuck the camera lens through the fence, he was now sitting on his upside-down cot and trying to figure out what Soba had been barking about.

(The green-and-white structure in the background is our portable chicken coop -- it's built on an old trailer chassis on wheels so we can move it around with the tractor. The hens free-range during the day and return to the coop at night. In the dog house, the nose and paws you see belong to Libby, one of our last two personal dogs from our original "Seattle six-pack" who moved to the ranch in Montana with us in 2000. Blind Goldie is our other one.)

Of course, no one was using the cot on the other side of the dog house. You know, the cot that was actually in the correct, upright position.

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Pot of Gold

This double rainbow on Saturday afternoon was so close -- both ends of the inner rainbow were on our property and visible from the house -- that if there had been a pot of gold, we would have seen it. Alas, no gold, but a beautiful sight nonetheless. In the photo above, you see two of our calves grazing between the pond and the start of the inner rainbow. 

The arc was so high I couldn't get it all in a single shot, but here's where it ended up:

And then, as I was taking the photos, the light shifted and suddenly the rainbow was reflected in the pond:

Nice!

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

And Now ... Irene, a.k.a. "Pistol"

This is Irene, who was the second dog who arrived on Sunday evening along with blind Owen. She came to us from Kentucky, where she had been turned into a rural shelter on a Friday in early September. The shelter staff saw that this little Shih Tzu/Peke mix was suffering from terrible problems in both eyes and was in a lot of pain, so they took her to a vet clinic for the weekend.  

A couple of days later I received an email from Suzy C., a volunteer for the shelter, who had taken the dog to the clinic that Friday.  She was writing to ask if we could help. Suzy wrote, "It is a young dog, very sweet, loves to be cuddled, but on pain meds waiting to see its fate. If we take it back to the shelter, it will be put to sleep. It needs surgery."  She ended her note by saying, "We are desperate to give this dog a chance!"

We agreed to take the dog and pay for whatever medical care she needed. The veterinarian ended up having to remove one of her eyes and was trying to save the second eye, which had developed a corneal ulcer. In a subsquent update on the dog's medical condition, the shelter director emailed me to say, "We are so grateful for your help! Going back to the shelter would be a death sentence and none of us wanted to see that happen."

As it turned out, this little dog arrived at the vet clinic the same week that Hurricane Irene was working its way up the East Coast, so the clinic staff named her Irene. She weighed all of 8 pounds. We hadn't even seen what she looked like until the clinic emailed us some photos of her after her surgery. Irene stayed at the clinic for a few weeks until our transport could pick her up; the shelter was unable to find a foster home for her for that time, but given the medical care and observation required for her remaining eye, it was just as well that she stayed there. She can see from that eye, though the corneal scarring does seem to hinder her vision somewhat.

But the minute we let her out of her crate in the transport van Sunday night, we realized a veritable "Hurricane Irene" -- the furry 8 lb variety -- had just arrived. While blind Owen was wrapping his paws around Alayne's neck and quietly cuddling like a teddy bear, Irene was jumping up and down on me, offering lots of little kisses, and twirling and bouncing as she ran about at the end of a leash. Talk about a ball of energy! By Monday morning we were already calling her "Pistol," though "Hurricane" would have been just as appropriate.

She has a bulging eye, squashed face, wild hair and an underbite, which doesn't make for a very photogenic girl.

But she asks, "Who says I'm not pretty?":

(Click on photo for larger image.)

She spent her first few days here happily rushing up to and greeting the other dogs, and trying to get some of them to play. Yesterday evening Alayne saw Irene repeatedly working on blind Avery, who sat motionless, ignoring the fluffy thing whirling around him:

Of course, she probably didn't realize Avery was blind and couldn't see her play bows, but after awhile she must have begun to wonder whether this was actually a Beagle statue decorating the front hallway:

She finally gave up on Avery (Avery: "Good grief, what was that?!?") and moved on in search of other pursuits.

Here's a rare sight -- the "sitting still Irene":

And something even more rare, the "sleeping Irene":

Apparently she can go for 16 hours without a battery recharge. 

We call her "motor mouth" because she makes lots of interesting, hard-to-define sounds, mostly with her mouth closed. Many different small motors in there somewhere.

You can't get anywhere near her without getting several kisses, and whether you bend down to her level or pick her up, either way you're going to get smooched. She is the happiest little thing, always thrilled to see us again -- even if it's only been 45 seconds since we were last in the room.

And there you have it -- please welcome Little Miss Hurricane Pistol Irene!

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

 

Please Welcome ... Blind Owen!

We had two wonderful little dogs arrive Sunday night, brought out to us by Gale Lang's TLC Pet Transport. This is one of them, Owen the Beagle, who came to us from North Carolina. (Sorry, you'll have to wait until Friday to find out who No. 2 was!) We were first contacted about Owen by a volunteer for Beagle Rescue of Southern Maryland, who had seen him listed in a "Must Be Out By..." email from a county animal control shelter in North Carolina. It said: 

 "Owen (A150080) is a 5 yo male Beagle, unaltered. Owen was a confiscation as part of a neglect case. He was found locked inside a trailer with no food or water. He was very thin and pitiful. He came in covered in fleas and urine. He had scaly patches and hair loss from the fleas and poor husbandry. He looks great now and has gained weight. He has been with us for two months while his case went to court. Owen is blind but compensates very well. He walks slowly and deliberately to feel his way around. He listens to your voice and comes when called. He loves to play with other dogs. He loves attention. He must be out by 9/10."

The volunteer said they were unable to help but hoped we could. I emailed the shelter, offering to take Owen, and the shelter then forwarded my email on to a private rescue group in Asheville called Brother Wolf Animal Rescue. In the small world that the animal rescue community often is, it turns out that Brother Wolf's executive director, Denise Bitz, was involved in rescuing and sending to us a blind and deaf Catahoula named Emmy Lou way back in 2006. (Emmy Lou was subsequently adopted by one of our employees in 2008.) Denise graciously offered to pull Owen from the shelter for us, get him neutered and vet-checked, and then foster him for a month until we could get the transport scheduled. Thank you, Denise!

On Sunday night, when Alayne picked Owen up to carry him into the house, he pressed his face against Alayne's and wrapped his front paws around her neck. He was so content to be held like this that Alayne just walked around the house for a while, holding him.

The next morning, however, it was like someone had fired a starter's pistol, because right after we let him out in one of the dog yards, he took off to go zooming around. He eagerly greeted his new friends, blind Louie and blind and deaf Spencer and Katie, and then raced back and forth from one side of the yard to the other. Owen was in constant motion, darting back and forth, so happy to be outside and cruising around. Although the shelter said he was 5 years old, he acts much more like a puppy!

The beautiful photo at top is one that Denise sent us last week. Here are some I took this morning, including this one of Owen with Louie on the left:

You can see what a handsome little fellow he is!

It was hard to get photos of him because he kept zooming up to me, and every time I'd try and take a few steps back, he'd just keep coming:

Finally, Owen momentarily ran out of steam, and that's when I got this shot:

For some reason the flash went off, even in bright sun, which is why his eyes are shining so much -- his pupils are wide open and the flash is bouncing off his retinas, just as you saw yesterday in the photo of Fuzzy and Sophie. Owen is another classic case of progressive retinal atrophy.

Next up is ... oh, that's right, I'll be holding off on the other new arrival until Friday. But no, it's not a Dachshund! (Owen's arrival now evens the score at Beagles, 6, and Dachshunds, 6.) However, this yet-to-be-seen arrival is smaller than a Dachshund ... has as much personality as a Dachshund ... but is not a Dachshund.

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Double Up

Our first task every morning is to put all the dogs out, no small undertaking with thirty of them. To make it as efficient and quick as possible, I "double-up" on my loads with the smaller dogs. Alayne took these photos the other morning as I was carrying my charges outside. In the photo above, I have Dexter and Widget in hand, who are usually the first to go out. That's because they are the loudest ones, howling and barking from their room on the second floor of the dog wing. That's where the midnight revelers sleep ... or not, as the case may be.

When we first moved here, there were three doors between our bedroom on the ground floor of the people wing and their room on the second floor of the adjoining wing -- with a bathroom, laundry room, mudroom and flight of stairs in between. Alas, we could still hear them  carrying on at 3 a.m. from our bedroom (Widget is a party Beagle who sleeps all day and likes to rock 'n roll in the middle of the night, and Dexter is her side-kick.) We finally installed a fourth door at the top of the stairs, and nighttime quiet at last returned. So the first trip in the morning is through all those doors and up to their room to get them, since they resume carnival festivities at dawn.

After I uploaded that photo on the computer I realized it looked like Widget was somehow slipping through my arm, but that wasn't the case -- I had a firm grip on her!

Next up are blind Fuzzy and blind Sophie:

Their eyes are glowing brightly because the flash is bouncing off their retinas; they are blind from progressive retinal atrophy, or PRA, and their pupils are wide open to allow as much light in as possible. (Click on photo for larger image.)

Meanwhile, as you can see in this next photo, it was very foggy outside:

That's our blind-and-deaf pair, Spencer and his sister Katie. 

Six down, twenty-four more to go!

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Another Shelter Challenge begins -- and No. 3 again already!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!

Going Under

I was walking out the back door of the dog wing the other morning and saw a cot in one of the yards tipped up against a dog house. Usually if a dog is going to try to get underneath a cot, he or she will end up flipping it entirely over. But this one was propped up, and I thought I saw something -- someone -- moving underneath it. It was a cool fall morning, about 10 a.m., when all the other dogs were lying around on the grass, soaking in the sun. I figured it had to be wobbly Soba, and sure enough, it was:

I asked her why she was underneath the cot, but never got an answer. Hmm.

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Another Shelter Challenge begins!

The new Shelter Challenge started October 3rd and ends at midnight on December 18th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories ... please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.

And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.

Please note:  Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.  [Yes, we are still listed as Rolling Dog Ranch for the purposes of the contest, not Rolling Dog Farm.]

 Because of your votes, we just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in this round of the Shelter Challenge. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!