Rolling Dog Farm

Rain

You may not want to read this if you're living in a part of the country that is suffering from drought and intense heat, because this post is about rain. And plenty of it. 

I took the photo a few days ago, after the dog dish had collected the previous night's rainfall -- two inches. We feed blind Jake his dinner outside in his yard because he often needs to, um, "use the facilities" right after eating. After bringing him in for the night, I forgot to pick up his dish until the following morning. I was no longer surprised to see how much rain we got all at once -- these heavy downpours seem to be more and more common. You can see in the photo that the raindrops hit the ground so hard they splattered dirt off the ground and into the dish.

Of course, it's not just us, or our imagination. Extreme precipitation events have become much more common in the past 50 years. And a new study just released today, When It Rains, It Pours: Global Warming and The Increase in Extreme Precipitation from 1948-2011, shows that New England is well ahead of the rest of the country in the frequency of extreme precipitation events, up 85% between 1948 and 2011. The next highest region is the Middle Atlantic states at 55%. And in New England, it's New Hampshire that has seen the most frequent extreme events -- up a whopping 115%. Next highest is Rhode Island at 90%. (The summary is here and the full study, including state and regional tables, is here.)

Another study, Trends in Extreme Precipitation Events for the Northeastern United States 1948-2007, was published by the University of New Hampshire in 2010 and also showed a significant increase in these events. That study, available here, said that historically, a two-inch rainfall could be expected to occur about two times each year in the Northeast. (Bear in mind that there are different ways to define "extreme precipitation" and degrees of "extreme," such as two-inch, four-inch and six-inch precipitation events.) I haven't counted how many two-inch events we've had already this year, but we are way over two!

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a related graphic from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

(Click on the graphic for a larger version.)

The methodology and timeframe behind that chart may be different from the other studies, but the results are still pretty dramatic.

The challenge for us is learning how to grow crops on naturally damp soil -- the farm is dotted with springs, and both of our wells are spring-fed -- when rain is increasingly coming down in torrents. Indeed, the morning after the storm that left 2 inches of rain in Jake's dish, we had another torrential downpour. I wish I had left a dish out to capture that rainfall, but it was so heavy I'd be surprised if it hadn't been close to 2 inches itself.

It's not just extreme precipitation that we will be learning to cope with as a result of climate change, of course, but more extreme weather events in general, as a recent study in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society explained.

The best "visual" on extreme weather is this next chart from Munich Re, the giant insurance company that is a global re-insurer (i.e., they insure other insurance companies, like State Farm, for major losses). Because much of their business is based on assessing risk from major weather events, Munich Re has collected this kind of data for years:

(Click on the graphic for a larger version.)

You can see the trend line is going only one way -- up. This matters to Munich Re, and by extension to their insurance company customers, because their rates for reinsurance are driven by the likelihood of these risks occurring.

Now, I'd rather have to deal with extreme precipitation events than extreme drought and heat. Alayne's father is in Wichita, Kansas, where it is forecast to hit 110° today and tomorrow, cooling off to 109° on Thursday, and back up to 111° on Friday. I can't imagine. What's a two-inch rainfall compared to that?

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

Enough About Willie. What About Me?

Willie wasn't the only one who had surgery late last week. Trooper, our hound with the bent front legs, was always very "jowly," with thick folds of skin under his jaw. Recently we noticed some swelling there, but then it would disappear ... only to come back. It was soft, felt like fluid, wasn't painful, and didn't interfere with Trooper's eating or drinking.

But when it ballooned up again, making Trooper look like a pelican, we took him to our primary care vet clinic in Whitefield. They diagnosed it as a salivary mucocele, which means one or more saliva glands are damaged and don't drain properly. The fluid collects in pockets under the skin. To repair it -- by removing the damaged saliva glands -- requires a board-certified surgeon, which is why we took Trooper to see Dr. Josie Mallinckrodt, who did Willie's surgery.

She performed surgery on Trooper on Friday, and I drove over to  Burlington on Saturday to pick up Trooper and Willie and bring them back to the farm. Both are doing fine, by the way. Alayne and I took these photos of Trooper this afternoon.

Here's a close-up of Trooper's incision site:

Although quite a lot of the fluid drained out during the surgery, there is still some there that will continue to drain out over the next couple of weeks. You can see how fleshy he still is:

This boy has saliva glands left, don't worry. And as a drooling hound dog -- feeding him was always an exercise in not getting slobbered on! -- we joked that he could actually afford to lose a couple!

The question is, how did his saliva glands get damaged? The culprit, we believe, is Austin the blind Beagle, who shares Trooper's yard during the day. We had noticed in the past year that Austin had started "playing" with his Uncle Trooper's jowls ... he'd take the folds of skin in his mouth and gently chew and suck on them. And oddly, Trooper would let him. We didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until the swelling first appeared that it occurred to Alayne to ask, "Hey, I wonder if that's from Austin chewing on him?"

So when Willie and Trooper came home this weekend, we moved Austin to a different play yard. He's now with Louie the blind Beagle, Bugsy, and eventually Willie (Willie will be in the house most of the time over the next couple of weeks as he recovers).

Austin is one of those dogs who loves to chew on things. Over the years he has destroyed everything from countless beds, electric cords, chair legs, satellite TV cables (subsequently placed in metal conduit), and just about anything else he can find. Kongs and chew toys do not interest him. Generally only expensive "novelty" items will do. Apparently we have to add jowls to the list.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

One Thing Leads To Another

Willie the blind Beagle needed to have his eyes removed because they had become painful, and we took him to our local vet clinic for the surgery last week. But on the physical exam before the procedure, our vet Dr. Nancy Lefavour detected a very pronounced heart murmur. She thought it might be as high as a Grade 5, and considered him too risky for surgery. She asked us to see if our veterinary ophthalomologist, Dr. Sarah Hoy, was comfortable doing an enucleation on him, or if she had other options to recommend.

Consequently, I scheduled two appointments for Willie last Friday in Burlington -- with our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Tanya Donovan, in the morning for an echocardiogram of his heart to find out just what kind of condition his heart is in, and then with Dr. Hoy in the afternoon for a consultation. I took the photo above of Tanya doing a physical exam on Willie.

I had mentioned to Tanya that Willie had a large fatty tumor in his pelvic region, and he'd had this for a few years. But we noticed it seemed to get larger in recent months, and I asked if she could put the ultrasound probe on it while she was doing the echocardiogram just to make sure nothing weird was going on. 

Here's Willie during the echo:

The good news was that his heart actually looked pretty good, and Tanya graded his heart murmur closer to a Grade 3/4. She considered him a reasonable risk for surgery.

When the time came to ultrasound the fatty tumor, Tanya was stunned to find some loops of intestine inside it. At first she thought the probe was picking up the intestines inside the abdomen, i.e., scanning through the fatty tumor, but it became clear the intestinal loops she was seeing on the screen were actually inside what we -- and numerous vets over the years -- had considered a run-of-the-mill fatty tumor. It turns out he had an inguinal hernia -- a hole in the abdominal wall that part of his intestines had slipped through.

Tanya is ultrasounding Willie's fatty tumor in this shot:

Willie was so stressed out by this that he actually fell asleep and began snoring during the imaging. No, really. He was snoring away when I took that photo.

Fortunately, his intestines are still working fine, which is one reason we never suspected anything was wrong. At some point, obviously -- and presumably this was recently when we noticed the fatty tumor getting larger -- he developed the hernia and then the intestinal looped popped out inside it.

For an interesting quick animation on how inguinal hernias are repaired in people, see this.

This kind of surgery requires a board-certified veterinary surgeon, so Tanya scheduled Willie to have the procedure performed by her colleague, Dr. Josie Mallinckrodt, who practices at the same clinic. Rather than put Willie through two different surgeries -- one for the hernia and one for his eyes -- Dr. Mallinckrodt planned to do the enucleation at the same time.

Yesterday morning I drove Willie to Burlington for the surgery. Dr. Mallinckrodt called last night to say he had come through it in great shape, had recovered from anesthesia, and should be ready to come home on Saturday.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

Wild Turkey Flock

For the past few weeks we've been enjoying watching an extended family of wild turkeys make themselves at home on the farm. The group includes a number of hens and their youngsters, which have been cruising across the fields, through the orchards and around the pond. (You may need to click on the photo for a larger image to get a better view.) They tend to be very skittish and wary about people, but seem to have grown quite a bit more comfortable being near us and the house, as you can tell from these photos I took from the back deck one evening.

Here's another view of them the same evening as they headed out around the pond:

We've counted up to 18 little ones, though it's hard to get an accurate count because some are so small you can't see them in the grass, and they are constantly moving. But it's quite a sizeable flock. It used to be that if an adult turkey was down by the pond and even heard us open a door up at the house, they'd turn and flee into the woods. Now they just look up and seem to say, "Oh, it's just them again."

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

Resting

Alayne took this photo of three of our blind horses resting early on a recent morning. Kate and I had been cleaning the corrals and spreading manure, and it takes us the better part of two days, even with one of us spreading with the tractor and the other spreading with our draft horses, Bill and Bob. So we left all the horses out on pasture overnight, rather than hurriedly putting the corral panels back together the previous evening, bringing the horses in for the night, and then taking the panels all back down again the next morning when we resumed the work. The horses sure didn't mind; they got to graze all they wanted (which is to say, almost nonstop), which is why they were finally all lying down the next morning.

We don't leave them out on pasture 24/7 because the paddocks are too small and couldn't take the constant grazing pressure. They'd be dirt lots in a couple of weeks. Most horses can get all the nutrition they need in 7 to 8 hours of grazing in any case, but they will eat around the clock. Cows, on the other hand, will only graze for 8 hours in a day; no more, no less. This has actually been scientifically measured in different cattle herds across three continents -- in the U.S., in Scotland, and in Australia, according to Andre Voisin in the grazing classic Grass Productivity. So cattle are actually a lot easier on pastures than horses. 

None of this mattered to the three blind horses, of course. They were just happy to be resting in the early morning sunshine on a beautiful summer day. That's Bridger on the left, Rosie in the middle and Nikki on the right. Traditionally we keep our blind horses in pairs, but this is a threesome that works well in terms of chemistry.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

 

More New England Farming

New England is well known for rocky ground (with New Hampshire called the "Granite State") and historically, farming in this part of the country involved clearing lots of rocks before you could begin tilling. Hence the thousands of stone walls around fields across the region. Over the last 100 years or so, as farms were increasingly abandoned and people moved to towns and cities or to better farmlands in the Midwest, a lot of agricultural land here reverted to forest, or ... if it was occasionally bush-hogged (mowed), to weedy pastures. And during those decades, rocks that were once buried gradually worked their way to the surface through frost-heaves and other natural forces. With no farmer still working the fields to pull them out, the once cleared land became rocky again. 

This was painfully evident when we began trying to till an old pasture about a month ago. My goal was to turn it into a new farm field for a corn crop. We are short of level, dry and well drained land for crops, and this field was all that and more, with great exposure. There had been a few trees on it that were logged before we moved here, but it looked like tilling with the tractor wouldn't be too much of a problem. I've tilled "virgin ground" here before in different parts of the farm and this field looked better than what I had already plowed.

But every time I put the plow in the ground and started moving forward, I'd get 10 to 20 yards and suddenly the shear pin on the plow would snap and the plow would rotate up and out of the ground. This is a safety feature designed to protect the plow and tractor from damage. Yet I wasn't hitting rocks -- indeed, in other fields the plow could actually handle decent sized rocks and not bust a shear pin. In fact, I'd never broken the shear pin before! But on this field, I wouldn't feel a thing in the tractor -- I'd just be gliding along and suddenly the plow had popped up in the back. 

It turned out the problem was tree roots -- masses of tree roots just below the surface of the ground. Even though the stumps had been pulled and the land looked relatively clean, one particular type of tree seemed to have left a network of roots snaking through the ground, just under the surface. The plow would make no sound as it encountered the roots, but it couldn't slice through them, so it slowly gathered the roots along the front of the blade as I drove forward until the pressure was too much -- and the shear pin would break.

A rototiller on the tractor couldn't handle it either, which meant calling in our neighbor Jim, who has a small excavator. So Jim went to work pulling up the roots with the teeth on the excavator bucket. As the roots came up ... so did the rocks. It seems the roots had actually been holding the rocks in place, keeping many of them from making it to the surface. 

Thus what started out as a root project became a rock project, too. In the photo above, you can see the new stone wall on the left of the cleared field that Jim was building with the rocks he pulled. (Click on photo for larger image.) I joked that he's probably the first person in at least 50 years to build a new stone wall in New England. It's taken a few weeks to get the major clearing done -- that was because of lots of rain delays, since you can't work the ground when the soil is wet.

Now what's left is for Kate and me to pull the remaining smaller rocks -- the ones too small for an excavator bucket -- by hand, and then I will use the tractor-mounted rototiller to work the soil into a seedbed. We are probably too late now for a corn crop, so this year I may just plant it to a good clover/timothy mix as a ground cover, get an early hay crop off it next year, then till it in and plant other crops.

As much work as this has been, it makes me realize how unbelievably fortunate we are to have machines to help us do it. I just marvel at the sheer strength and tenacity of our ancestors, who did all this work by hand and built miles and miles of stone walls with their own physical labor. Here's a photo of the stone wall around this field:

To give you a sense of how high this is, here's the same stone wall with the opening we made in it to get access to this new field:

That wall is three to four feet high. We have stone walls like this all across the farm. Our ancestors not only pulled those rocks by hand but loaded them on to sleds (called, appropriately enough, stoneboats) that oxen or horses dragged to the fenceline, then built the walls by hand, too. It's amazing to me what they accomplished. Some of our favorite books about this era are the illustrated ones by Eric Sloane, like Once Upon A Time: The Way America Was and The Seasons of America Past.

For now, though, we are very grateful to have a neighor with an excavator!

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

On A Happier Note...

First, thank you for all your wonderful and heart-warming comments about our recent losses. We really appreciate it. I figured we were overdue for some good news, so here goes!

Last Friday, when Alayne took Sparky over to see our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Tanya Donovan, she also took Widget and Dexter as well. Dexter was in for a follow-up on his front leg lameness, and Widget was in for her annual geriatric screening.

Dexter's disc issue is, fortunately, getting better and at this point doesn't require anything more than some anti-inflammatories.

In the the photo above Dr. Donovan is doing part of her physical exam of Widget while Dexter looks on. (Sparky was also in the room at the time but behind Alayne.) Widget's "dashboard" readings were all superb -- her organs looked good on ultrasound, her chest X-ray was nice and clear, her bloodwork was perfect, and her heart condition hasn't changed at all from her last echocardiogram. She'll continue on heart meds but the lack of any deterioration in the past year was such a relief.

In other words, she's good for another 10,000 miles!

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!   

One Week Later, Another Loss -- Sparky

Just a week after losing little Pip, we lost another recent arrival, blind Sparky. 

I had mentioned in his introductory blog post that we suspected he had hip dysplasia because of the way he walked with his hind legs. Our primary care vet thought at the time that it was from lack of muscle tone, since Sparky had been tied up most of his life and was also emaciated when he came. I mentioned then that Sparky was in constant motion, always cruising the dog yard and rarely resting. We thought that might have something to do with spending his life tied up, too. He was also incontinent, both with pee and poop, though yet again we initially attributed this to simply having been an outside dog, tied up and forced to live in his own waste, so he had become used to going whenever he had the urge. 

But as the weeks wore on and we finally began getting some weight on him, his hips seemed to deteriorate. At times he seemed fine, but other times he didn't have a normal gait in his hindquarters. 

Then, in recent days, he suddenly took another turn for the worse -- he began dropping his hindquarters to the ground, yet he continued to try and keep moving. Then he began crossing his front legs over as he walked. And if he stopped moving, he'd sink over to the right. That's when we realized this was something far beyond a hip issue, and was neurological. 

On Friday, Alayne took Sparky to see our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Tanya Donovan, at Burlington Emergency and Veterinary Specialists. That's when we learned Sparky had both a brain tumor and lumbosacral disease. What we thought originally was hip dysplasia was in fact his lumbosacral disease, which that write-up says "is often confused with arthritis of the hips as the signs may appear similar." It also explained his incontinence.

Tanya said the brain tumor was causing the forelimb involvement, the general weakness in gait, his sinking to the right, as well as his need to be in constant motion. She said it's a perverse but often classic feature of brain tumors to cause an animal to keep moving, even if physically they can barely do so. All the signs we were seeing were consistent with an advanced brain tumor, Tanya said. We could try some medical management, but it would buy us at most a few days. In another week, Tanya told Alayne, we would probably begin seeing Sparky start having seizures.

We've been through two brain tumors -- blind Pepper in 2008 and blind Callie in 2010 -- and these never end well. Although radiation therapy gained us an additional 18 months with Callie, for nearly a year of that she wasn't her normal self. The treatment had taken a real toll on her, and the tumor came back anyway.

With Sparky suffering from both a brain tumor and spinal disease, we decided to let him go and not put him through any more. Tanya euthanized him Friday afternoon while Alayne held his head in her hands.

Like so many of these dogs who come to us, life had been so unfair to this boy. Here Sparky had a miserable life, finally found his way to a safe and loving place, and dies less than three months later.

He was such a sweet boy, too. On Friday morning Kate and I had been grooming him before putting him in the truck, and he was licking both her and me as we brushed him. He really had become very affectionate.

My favorite memory of Sparky was from a couple of weeks ago, when I saw him rolling in the green grass in the dog yard, stretched out on his back, front paws up by his face. He rolled and rolled and rolled. It was the happiest I'd ever seen him. At least we were able to give him that.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!   

Is There More?

I took this shot the other day after giving my lunch plate to Wilbur to clean up. Alayne and I had enjoyed egg salad sandwiches for lunch, and I had some left over that I knew he'd love to lick up. Because of the lensectomy we had to do to save the vision in his remaining eye, he is very far-sighted -- and often doesn't know when things are right in front of him. So after licking up some of the egg salad, he thought he was done -- and didn't realize there was still a bit more on the plate. Hence the look he was giving me. I got back down on the floor and pointed to the egg salad still on the plate. "Oh, there it is!" Pretty soon I had a nice, clean plate. And a happier Wilbur. 

Sometimes when I hand him a morsel from our meals, he doesn't realize there's food in front of his mouth until he smells it -- literally under his nose. Then the little mouth with only six teeth and one long tongue opens, and the morsel is gone.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!  

Newspaper Story On The Farm

New Hampshire's major daily newspaper, the Union Leader, carried a very nice feature story on the farm in yesterday's edition. The reporter had come out last Thursday to visit with us and meet the animals. You can read the story here. Please note that sometimes newspapers archive a story soon after publication and the original link no longer works; if this happens, just search for Rolling Dog Farm in their search box and you should find the story.

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Please Vote for the Farm!

The latest Shelter Challenge started Monday, July 9 and ends at midnight on September 16. 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.

*** We are now LISTED UNDER OUR NEW NAME, ROLLING DOG FARM.  State is still NH for New Hampshire. ***

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

We just won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the last contest, and thousands more in the previous contests. The Shelter Challenge really does bring in a lot of money for the animals here!

You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.  

Thank you for your votes!