Rolling Dog Farm

At The ASPCA

One of the ASPCA's media relations people was kind enough to email me late today this photo of Alayne at the event in New York with the award.  Alayne said the luncheon was very nice and everything went well.  Prior to presenting the award, the ASPCA showed a video they had produced about the ranch, and the highlight of the piece was a clip of Charlie our once-blind Beagle admiring himself in the mirror.

Alayne almost didn't make it to New York -- yesterday's trip was a real ordeal.  Her flight on United from Missoula to Denver was cancelled because of weather in Denver, and then a back-up flight on Delta/Northwest from Missoula to Minneapolis was postponed by several hours, making it too late to catch her connecting flight to La Guardia.  Finally the ASPCA's travel agent got her out of Missoula late in the day to Salt Lake City.  She then spent several hours in the airport there before leaving at midnight on a red-eye to New York that arrived at JFK at 6 a.m. this morning.  With events starting at 10 a.m. -- egads.  So she is naturally exhausted from the trip and looking forward to being back home tomorrow evening!

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As Alayne was literally walking out the door yesterday for the airport, the phone rang.  I glanced at the caller ID, which showed a 202 area code phone number (Washington D.C.) and the listing as "Democratic Sen."  I picked it up and said, with our usual greeting, "Rolling Dog Ranch, this is Steve."  The caller said, "Steve, it's Max.  How about that award!"

Now, if you're a Montanan and a guy named Max calls you from Washington, there's only one Max it can be ... our United States Senator, Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.  And as busy as he is, he took the time yesterday to call and congratulate us on the ASPCA award.  This is actually the second time Senator Baucus has called.  His first call came a few years ago, after someone had told him about us and he looked up our Web site.  He was calling then just to let us know that he thought we were doing a great thing here at the ranch.  This kind of 'personal touch' is one reason he's serving his sixth term in the Senate.

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

USA Today Blog Post on ASPCA Award

There's a wonderful story on the ranch and the ASPCA's Henry Bergh Award in USA Today's Pet Talk column today.  It's a beautifully written piece by Sharon Peters, who first wrote about us for USA Today in 2007.  The headline is:  Pair's wonderful way with disabled animals is rewarded.  You can read the story here.

Back To The Land

It's that time of year again -- getting the compost spread on the pastures.  We try to wait as late as possible in the fall, after we've moved animals out of the pastures but before the first heavy snow arrives.  And once or twice, we've been surprised by an earlier-than-usual 'season-ender' snowfall, forcing us to hold over a windrow or two of compost until the following spring.

This fall I have some help in the form of my brother Mike, visiting from Bozeman this week, who was driving the tractor when I took that photo above.  He -- like every guy -- loves any work that involves tractors, and this time of year we have plenty of that to go around.  (It's also National Put-Your-Relatives-To-Work Week.)  Late October and early November are crunch times around here, just like May is -- a lot of time-consuming pasture work, but very dependent on the weather to determine what you can and can't get done on any given day.

We've already spread new grass seed in those parts of the pastures where we had sprayed for cheatgrass last fall or where we just had thin areas that needed some renovation.  (Cheatgrass is a nasty, invasive plant I've written about before.)  We're using the compost to lightly layer on top of the new seed.  It's cold enough that the seed will stay there, dormant under the compost and winter snows, until next spring.  This is called "frost seeding."  If you do this too early and get some warm weather, your seed can sprout -- and then the tiny green shoots, along with their fragile new roots, will be killed by the subsequent cold weather. 

You may be wondering why we don't just wait till spring to plant, right?  Well, for a couple of reasons.  One, frost seeding gives the grass a head-start in the spring, when it might be too wet and muddy, and the ground too soft, for us to get in with the tractor and spreader to plant then.  (We do plant some grass seed in the spring, but it's usually around the buildings or along the drive where the ground is firmer and we don't have to worry about impacting grazing ground.)  Second, it also spreads out (no pun intended) the pasture management workload between two seasons, rather than trying to do it all in May. 

Hopefully the snow will hold off long enough for us to finish!

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Happy To Be Home

I drove back to our vet clinic in Helena today to pick up some animals we'd left there last week, as well as to take blind Helen for her latest chemotherapy treatment.  One of the dogs who came home was blind Samantha, who'd been to the clinic for a dental and to have a growth removed on her side.  The growth appears to be benign, fortunately.

When the vet tech was bringing Samantha through the surgery suite in the back of the clinic, Sam heard my voice and just about jumped out of her skin with excitement.  She whirled and twirled and jumped up and down, pulling the vet tech with her as she made her way towards me.  Her eyes lit up and then came that famous smile of hers.  I don't think I'd ever seen her as happy.  But then I realized this was what happened before with blind Madison, too, and others who have been left at the vet clinic for the first time since coming here:  they wonder if they'd been abandoned again.  And hearing our voice is the first indication they get that they're going home. 

As you can see from the photo above, Sam was just as excited when we got back to the ranch.  That's her greeting Alayne after getting out of the truck.  For an older girl, she's still pretty spry!  (Sam, that is, not Alayne.  Though Alayne is pretty spry herself.  As for her age, well, I'm not saying a thing.)

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Oooooh, That Feels Good

It's understandable if you don't recognize this as blind Gabe, and no, he's not undergoing sensory deprivation either!  He has had a rough go of it since coming home from three weeks of radiation therapy for his nasal tumor at WSU.  The side-effects of the radiation caused the skin around his eyes and the top of his snout to become inflamed, bleed, and eventually peel off; this itched like crazy, too, but of course that's why he had to wear a cone, because scratching at the skin eruptions would only make them much worse.  His mouth developed oral ulcers, too, and infection developed.  So he's been on a long course of eye ointments, antibiotics and pain medications.  All of this the oncologist at WSU had prepared us for.  (We did not experience these side-effects from blind Callie's brain tumor radiation treatment because of where the radiation field was located.)

Fortunately, we are through the worst of it now, and though he has lots of bare skin around his eyes and his nose, his skin has stopped new rounds of blistering.  One thing he still loves is a warm, wet compress over his eyes and nose; it's soothing and clearly feels so good he'll just sit there with it draped over his face like this.  I took the photo of Gabe enjoying his compress this morning.  He's wearing a soft cone that's padded and flexible.  He's just disappointed it didn't come in camouflage.

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Not To Be

Well, I had tried really hard not to get my hopes up over this, but after we saw blind Madison's pupils respond to light during her eye exam last week, it was impossible not to keep thinking about what it would mean to give Madison the gift of sight, too.  So I was kind of a nervous wreck this morning when I drove her to Helena for her electroretinogram, or ERG, which would determine how much retinal function she had.  

After getting Madison sedated, the probes inserted, and the ERG machine initialized, our vet Dr. Brenda Culver picked up the yellow device that shines the bright light into the eye.  As I waited for the first pulse of light to flash in Madison's left eye, I held my breath and looked at the monitor screen.  A graph would appear almost instantly, and I knew what to look for.

I am not too proud to admit that I fought back tears when I saw the line appear on left side of the graph and begin to move sideways.  Madison was flat-lining.  She had no retinal function in that eye.

Brenda said, "Wait, don't react yet.  I want to repeat it."

But it was still the same result.  It was the same for her right eye, too.

She would never see again.

While Madison recovered from the anesthesia, I went out to the truck and called Alayne with the news.  Yes, by this time I was in tears.  With Charlie's experience at regaining vision so fresh in our minds, we wanted so desperately to do the same thing for Madison.  Intellectually I knew we only had a 50/50 chance, but emotionally we were 100% invested in a positive outcome.

I asked Brenda how we could have a pupillary light reflex -- which indicates the retina is detecting some light -- but have the ERG completely flat-lining.  The answer is a complicated one, having to do with how the retina itself works, but it comes down to degree of retinal function.  And Madison just didn't have enough to matter.

We had the opposite situation many years ago when we lived in Seattle.  Our dog Goldie was having some eye issues, and we took her to a veterinary ophthalmologist there for an exam.  Goldie flat-lined on her ERG, and yet she could still clearly see at that point.  The ophthalmologist marveled at this result, and told us that it just showed how much we still don't understand about how the brain and body can "re-wire" itself to cope.  She said at the time, "The ERG is telling us one thing, the dog is telling us something else."  It took a couple of years for Goldie's vision to catch up to the ERG results.

But today, sadly, there was no denying what Madison's ERG meant.  

Here's a close-up view of Madison after Brenda finished administering the ERG:

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Charlie Gets Adopted!

Barely a month after his eye surgery to restore his vision, Charlie the once-blind Beagle from Georgia has now been adopted!  Julie and Richard S. from Olympia, Washington, were looking for a friend for their Beagle Hugo.  They had lost their other Beagle, Sampson, about a year ago to cancer, and wanted to find another companion for Hugo.  After several emails with us about Charlie, they came out to the ranch to meet our special boy -- and they decided he was the one!  That's Charlie on the left and Hugo on the right.

Charlie has come a long way from the skinny, blind dog who was picked up as a stray in Cherokee County, Georgia, this past spring.  Now he's filled out, able to see, and has a loving new family to call his own.  We told Julie and Richard that Charlie, a dog from the Deep South, was also very excited to be leaving Montana just before winter arrived!

Thank you, Julie and Richard and Hugo for giving Charlie a wonderful home!

(Oh.  Almost forgot to mention:  The Dachshunds got together and did a bunch of little high-fives as soon as Charlie left.  They'd been getting worried that the Beagles were beginning to challenge their preeminent position at the ranch.  "One down, only two-and-a-half to go!," chirped Daisy.)

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!

Pony Express

Blind Rosie is on strict stall rest for four weeks as part of her colic surgery recovery, and the only exercise she is allowed right now is a closely supervised walk.  The way we worked that into the schedule is to take her with us to get the mail every day.  Lena's Barn, where her stall is located, is a full 1/4 mile (.40 km) from the mailbox at the other end of the drive, so she gets a good 1/2 mile walk from the mail run.  Alayne got this photo of me with Rosie yesterday on a cool, wet fall day.  She's glad to get out of the stall, but right now we can tell that this is just about as much exercise as she's ready for.  It's not really the "Pony Express," I guess ... more like the "Pony Shuffle."

Colic surgery is an incredibly invasive, difficult surgery, and it can really take a lot out of the horse.  (Not to mention the bank account: $5,700 for Rosie's surgery and hospitalization!  Oh.my.goodness.)  So the "road back" is slow and careful ... controlled feeding, controlled exercise, and controlled environment -- no horsey fooling around during the recovery!

That's why blind Bo is off with Lena and Nikki in a distant pasture.  As I was pulling out of the drive with Rosie in the trailer that day, Alayne was already moving Bo over to be with those two.  He would simply get too frantic to be by himself.  This little threesome is doing great together on pasture.  When Rosie is done with stall rest and then four weeks of access to a small outdoor run, she'll be reunited with Bo.  But for now, she's actually doing great by herself.  As for Bo ... well, he got two girls out of the deal, so no complaints there!

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you! 

All Systems Go

When our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was here last Monday to do the annual exams and vaccinations on everyone, she detected a heart murmur in Widget and recommended we get an echocardiogram done.  So when I went to Missoula last Friday to pick up blind Rosie from her colic surgery hospitalization, I took Widget along so our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, could do the echo.  While we were at it, I asked him to do an abdominal ultrasound, chest X-rays, bloodwork and urinalysis.  In other words, we wanted to have all her systems checked out.  She's now at that age -- about 8 years old -- where we really start worrying that we'll miss something and not catch it in time.

In the photo above, Dave is doing the echocardiogram of her heart.  It turns out she has mitral valve regurgitation, but at this point it's not significant and doesn't require any medications.  It is something we'll need to have rechecked every 6 to 12 months, though.

Her chest X-rays looked fine.

On the abdominal ultrasound, however, Dave found some nonspecific spots on her kidneys that would have required the urinalysis any way to see if kidney function was becoming impaired.  The BUN and creatinine kidney values that are analyzed from the blood work don't typically show any changes until something like 75% of the kidney function is already lost ... so by the time you see changes in the BUN and creatinine, you're already in trouble.  The urinalysis can give you an early look at kidney function.

This afternoon Dave called with the results, and we were relieved at the news:  All of her lab tests looked great!  Nice job, Widget!

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you! 

It's Hard To Choose. So I Won't.

As you can probably imagine, we are always doing laundry around here.  On any given day we do about five to seven loads, most of it the dog and cat bedding. That means there's always a stack or two (or three) of freshly laundered bedding, neatly folded and waiting to go back to one of the animal cottages.  Alas, one of Dexter's favorite activities involves knocking over those stacks and lying down on top of them.  It's as if he wants to claim all of the bedding as his own.  Being a Dachshund, that seems like a perfectly reasonable proposition.

If he can't knock the stack over because it's too high -- say, on top of the dining table -- he stands up on his hind feet, grabs the bottom piece of bedding with his teeth, and pulls the whole stack off.  It was a dining table heist that Alayne captured in the photo above.  Needless to say, this can get just a wee bit aggravating, walking into the house and finding the neat stacks of clean bedding knocked onto the floor with a Dachshund perched on top.  Although it's just a wee bit difficult to get mad at a face that looks like that.

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for us every day in The Animal Rescue Site/PetFinder's Shelter Challenge.  Thanks to your votes, we came in third nationwide and won $3,000 for the animals in the previous contest.  Now we have a shot at No. 1 and the $20,000 grand prize!  Enter "Rolling Dog Ranch" and our state postal code, MT for Montana, and it will bring up our listing so you can cast your vote.  Please ask your family and friends to vote, too.  Thank you!