Rolling Dog Farm

I Wore Myself Out Eating

Cindy got this photo of blind Samantha in her crate after eating dinner at Widget's House.  She noticed that as soon as Samantha had finished eating, she got very quiet ... and when Cindy looked inside the crate, she found Samantha sound asleep with her face in the food bowl. 

We feed the dogs in their crates to give each one the opportunity to eat at their own speed.  This way the slow eaters don't feel any competition from the fast eaters, and the pushy ones don't get a chance to steal food from the meek ones.  It makes for an orderly, chaos-free way to feed 20 dogs in one room.  It also gives dogs who want to fall asleep with their faces in their food bowls the chance to do that, too.

Another Sleeping Dachshund

Continuing on yesterday's theme, here is blind Callie snoozing away on the living room couch.  It's just not clear to me that she has enough beds and blankets available for her sleeping needs.  As zonked as she was, this must have been after another exhausting session grooming one of her clients here at the ranch.

Who Needs To Breathe?

I've posted before about how little Bailey loves to rest his head on a soft toy while he sleeps, usually by taking the toy into his mouth and using it as a prop.  The other evening I noticed a new twist on this procedure.  For some inexplicable reason, he had buried his face inside a long lambidoodle toy and had it wrapped completely around the outside of his mouth.  His nose was totally buried in the middle of the toy, even as his head was pointed straight down.  I listened carefully to see if I could hear him breath but I couldn't detect any sounds -- yet the gentle up-and-down motion of his body told me that yes, he was very much breathing and alive and well!

Winter Travelogue At The Ranch

Early Sunday morning, Alayne was leaving the house to start barn chores when she noticed the sun lighting up the frosty trees around us.  We had a brief ice fog over night, and it coated everything in white crystals.  I was at Widget's House taking care of the dogs before heading over to the horses when she took these photos.  It was 3 below zero (-19 C), but no wind ... and with the sun shining, we put a morning like this in the "brisk" category.

In the photo at top, you're looking southeast with the sun having come over the top of Marcum Mountain and making a clump of our cottonwoods incandescent.

In this next shot, you're looking northeast from behind Lena's Barn.  The peaks are in the Scapegoat Wilderness.  The berm of snow is from keeping our lane to the back of the barn open:

Here's another set of frosty cottonwoods:

That's our vehicle barn on the left and Lena's Barn in the back, with the roof of Scout's Barn on the right:

This is a young aspen outside our back door ... you're looking due south here:

And finally, here's our little house with Ovando Mountain behind it.  Alayne took this shot from the lane to the sighted horse corral.  You can see that small frosty aspen from the photo above at the corner of our house:

Once we got done with the chores, it was time for a Sunday morning breakfast -- pancakes, OJ and coffee!

He's Two. And That Means Trouble.

Blind Cash turned two years old on Saturday, and as you can see, we had a beautiful weekend to celebrate his 2nd birthday.  I took the photo this afternoon, and Alayne came out to present the youngster for the camera.  (Yes, longtime blog readers, please note Mrs. Babushka makes another appearance!)

By the time Cash turned one, we had started calling him "Mr. Full-of-Himself."  Then we found out last year that the folks who have Cash's sister back in Alabama had taken to calling her "It's-All-About-Me" ... so we knew it had to run in the bloodlines.  (She's not blind.)

Make no mistake, Cash may be a handsome boy but he is definitely at that "punk" stage -- always trying to see what he can get away with, pestering his friend blind Nikki (three years his senior) until she finally lets him have it, and generally annoying our queen bee, blind Lena. 

It was Lena's job to teach this born-blind colt some manners after he arrived here at the age of 4 weeks.  There are days we look at Cash and his misbehavin' antics and we say to Lena, "Honey, this one got away from you somehow, didn't he?"  Lena kind of feels like we made her into a boarding school headmistress who's always expected to turn unruly children into well-behaved, model students.  She doesn't think this is fair since she didn't sign up for the job in the first place and we don't give her enough hay to make it worth her while anyway.

Lena still sees potential in him -- "he's just not applying himself," she says -- and so do we.  Some day he's going to be a fine young horse.  But for now, he's two ... and t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

The Sleeping Widge

I was sitting in a living room chair the other evening with my laptop and looked over to see this rather odd sight across from me.  That's Widget -- or the Widge, as we often call her, or Widgee-woo, or (get your French accent on here) Wee-jhay -- snoring away.  All I could see was the very front of her face with that black-olive nose and then those two little back feet, propped up on the chair. 

Yes, her eyes are open, but our blind animals often sleep with their eyes open.  No need to close 'em to get some sleep when it's already dark!

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And then, here is a completely unrelated photo that Alayne took a couple of weeks ago as the sun was setting in the west and lighting up the ridge to the east of us:

Those are some of our original, smaller animal cottages next to our house.  That's Birdie's Cottage on the left, Keisha's Cottage on the right, and the isolation cottage in the back.  In the foreground is the gate I featured in a blog post a couple of days ago, after we gave up digging it out all the time.

Because of that ridge behind us, we have some of the most spectacular sunsets out here.  We'll head out the back door in the evening to go to the wood shed or to one of the cottages, and we'll look up and see the mountains lit up and glowing in all this red and pink light.  You just have to stop and soak in the sight.

Something New And Different

My favorite saying about horses is this:  "If there's a way, they will."  Our horses, blind and sighted alike, continue to find novel ways to do things to get themselves into a jam ... things that you wouldn't think possible. 

Yesterday afternoon I was in my office, about to hit the "save" tab on the day's blog post, when Cindy called me on the intercom phone.  "We've got a problem.  Marie's stuck on the feeder," she said.  I asked, "She's in the feeder?"  Cindy said, "No, she's kind of wrapped around the feeder and can't get up." 

I told Alayne what had happened, grabbed my coat, put my boots on, and rushed out to the corrals. 

There was Marie, our elderly blind mare, just as Cindy had described ... lying on the ground, straddling the big tire feeder.  As luck would have it, the feeder was just big enough to fit entirely inside her legs, her belly was right up against the edge of the feeder, and she couldn't figure out how to extract herself from this predicament.  Any other time of the year, we would have muscled the 200-lb tire feeder out of the way, but it was locked down tight, frozen in a foot of ice and snow. 

Cindy and I pondered the situation and realized that the only thing to do was to roll her over onto her other side, away from the feeder.  This is definitely from the "easier said than done" category of things-to-try-in-life.  As we went off in search of ropes and lariats, Alayne brought out the camera for me (hey, I know a blog moment when I see one!). 

Now, what we were about to do was very tricky.  We had to loop ropes around her legs, make sure she could still step out of them quickly once we got her up on her feet, hope she didn''t freak out once we started pulling, and keep ourselves safe from flailing hooves.

I will say this:  Our blind horses are incredibly calm, trusting and sensible.  That's one reason Marie wasn't really struggling before we got there.  She realized she was stuck and was waiting for us, her humans, to come help.  We have had other situations here where a sighted horse might have broken a leg or otherwise seriously injured itself, but a blind horse doesn't panic and patiently waits for help.

In the photo at the very top of this post, Cindy and I have looped ropes around Marie's front and back feet.  Notice she's quietly lying there.

Next came the hard part ... trying to pull Marie's 1,000 lb body completely over:

You can see in that photo she's extended her legs out and is trying to figure out what the heck we're doing to her.

Cindy and I also have to get her body to move in unison, both front and back ends at the same time, which is also easier said than done because of the sheer size and how her weight is distributed.  Here we're starting to get her rolling but we're not in unison yet:

Now we're getting there:

Then we've reached the tipping point and I'm scrambling to get out of the way of her back feet ... I'm closer to them than it appears in the photo and I don't know what she's going to do when she rolls over onto her other side:

Success!

She stands there calmly while I walk her out of the ropes around her feet:

And then Marie's boyfriend, blind Hawk, comes over to see what's going on.  Through this entire episode he's been 30 feet away, eating hay from another feeder and ignoring his maiden-in-distress.  Hawk had this "Did I miss something?" expression on his face:

Off With Her Toe

I took blind Penny into Missoula today for surgery to remove the cancerous toe we discovered last week.  In the photo above, Dr. Dave Bostwick is cutting the bone to remove the toe up to the first joint.  Based on the X-rays showing the cancer eating the bone, he thinks that will remove it all.  That's good news, because even with the toe missing from the first joint on, she will still have enough of the digit left for weight-bearing.  Taking off up to the second joint doesn't leave enough for that. 

Here's what her foot looked like after the surgery, with the wound all sewn up:

Dave will send the toe to Colorado State University's veterinary pathology lab to find out what kind of tumor it was.  Typically these are melanomas or squamous cell carcinomas (in my earlier post I mistakenly wrote "sarcoma" for that second type of cancer).  It will take about 10 days to get the full results back.

Penny came through surgery just fine, and here she is wearing a pretty pink bandage on that foot.  When I took this photo she was beginning the process of recovering from anesthesia:

She was in and out of surgery and completely recovered within a few hours, and by early afternoon I had her back at the ranch.  On the ride home she kept trying to tear the bandage off, so she is now wearing a cone on her head and is not a happy girl!

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Update on blind Evelyn:  Her blood work came back perfectly normal, which was a big relief because we were very afraid she was in chronic renal failure.  But her kidney values were perfect.  So we are now adding significantly more calories to her diet to see if we can reverse the weight loss, even though we had already adjusted her feeding earlier without much success.  Evelyn was filling up pretty quickly on sheer volume of food -- we were letting her eat as much as she wanted to get weight on her -- but she just may not have been getting the full calorie load her body now wants.  Thus we are feeding her for maximum calories.  Dave wants to rule out calorie intake as an issue before we take the next diagnostic step, which would mean investigating intestinal malabsorbtion problems.

Stuck

This is the gate between our back yard (or what passes for a "back yard") and the dog cottages next to our house.  We valiantly kept it open all winter long by constant digging and chipping (note crow bar and shovel) but finally have given up.  It is now half-buried in snow and ice.  We had fierce winds all weekend, with snow piling up in packed drifts and filling every scrap of open space ... as in the two-foot deep hole we had carefully dug around this gate for the past three months.  Even when we had the hole open and the gate usable, it only stayed that way because we chipped out the ice that formed at the base every few days whenever the sun would come out and melt a little snow ... which would turn into ice at night.

Our main road to the highway (about two miles away) is now closed again because of drifts, leaving the back road (known only to those of us who live out here) for access to the highway.  Yesterday the county snowplow truck even got stuck trying to open the road right next to the ranch, about 50 yards from our gate, so another neighbor and I went out with shovels and tractors to see if we could help the driver dig out. 

But we're done digging this gate out.  The next time it swings shut will be sometime in late March or early April!

This Will Do Just Fine, Thanks

There are times we wonder why we buy expensive beds and cots for the dogs when ... well, when a box is all you need!  Anita M. from Texas kindly sent us a shipment of blankets a couple of weeks ago.  We opened the box, left it on the living room floor to unpack later, and lo and behold, there's been a dog sleeping in it ever since.  Really.  As in, all day long, we have an ever-changing parade of dogs who settle into the box for a nap.  It's almost like they're taking turns.  That's blind Briggs above.

Here is blind Goldie:

Daisy the Dachshund isn't even burrowing in it, just curling up on top:

And of course, no blog post on the subject of sleeping dogs would be complete without an appearance by The Honorable Miss Widget of Ovando:

Notice how the dogs and blankets change but the box remains the place to be?  Some of the dogs like to rearrange things and will pull a blanket or two out to get it just so, or they will try to fluff up a blanket and end up knocking it out of the box.  But at the bedtime, we fold up whatever blankets have fallen on the floor, put them back in the box, and it's ready for another hard day's sleeping.