Rolling Dog Farm

And Now ... Here's Zach!

2013-05-22T11:26:35-04:00

This rather rotund fellow is blind Zach, who came from the same shelter as Darla. After we had agreed to take Darla and just before our transport arrived, the shelter director emailed me to say:

So the luck of this is like getting hit by lightning - we just had another dog that is blind surrendered to us. The dog is approximately 10 years old and has lived with an older woman that passed away this last week and her family surrendered the dog to us.... Let me know please. I will understand if the answer is no, but I had to try.

[People: If you think your family is going to take care of your beloved pets if something should happen to you, think again. We see this all too often. Please don't make any assumptions.]

Here's what he looked like when he was turned over to the shelter:

The shelter took him to a groomer right away, and after getting him bathed and clipped up, they could see he had a very large growth between his eyes.

So last week I took Zach along to Burlington to get that growth checked out, as well as a general geriatric screening so we'd know what kinds of medical issues he might have.

Here's our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Tanya Donovan, holding him for the blood draw:

In this shot Tanya is doing a fine needle aspirate of the growth to pull cells out:

The good news is that the pathologist found the cells were mostly inflammatory, not cancerous, so we don't have to worry about a tumor at this stage. But it still needs to come out to make sure it doesn't become something lethal later. He'll be having that surgery in a few weeks.

On ultrasound all of his organs looked good, too:

His blood work was all normal as well, so other than being blind, Zach's in great shape. We have him scheduled to see the ophthalmologist in a few weeks as well. At this point I can't tell what he's blind from. I tested his eyes with the Tono-Pen and his eye pressures were on the border between the high end of normal and just above, so he may be developing glaucoma ... though there seems more going on.

Now, enough about Zach's medical status -- let's talk about his personality. As in, there's a lot of it! He is a bundle of love and affection, and is so very sweet. He actually likes to roughhouse with us, pawing and twirling and trying to get us to play with him. It's just endearing. When I was taking photos of him in the dog room this morning for this post, he could tell I was sometimes down on my knees for various shots, and he thought I was inviting him to roughhouse. He's wonderful with all the other dogs, too.

He seems to really like Darla, too, as if he knows he has her to thank for coming here!

Blossoms

2013-05-19T19:23:08-04:00

Washington, D.C. may have its cherry blossoms, but we've got our apple blossoms ... and everywhere we look right now, it's stunning. Apple trees are blossoming across the farm. I took the photo above on Saturday evening; you can see that different trees are in different stages of blossoming. I took this next shot this morning from the front porch:

Like the trees in the first photo, these are old orchard trees, but in the background, you can see a wild apple tree blossoming at the edge of the woods. (Click on photos for larger images.)

Like any fruit tree, apple trees need tending to remain healthy and productive. No one has pruned the apple trees here at the farm in at least 30 years, perhaps longer, and they definitely needed help. We were fortunate to find a lady from nearby Vermont, Nancy Murray, who runs a business called Northern Spy Apple Tree Pruning.(Northern Spy is the name of an old-time New England heirloom apple.) She makes her living tending apple trees in Vermont and New Hampshire for people who want to preserve and improve their orchards. Nancy made her first visits in April and worked on the trees in the photo above, which she called "godmother trees" because of their age.

Here's a close-up of that tree by the porch:

Last year we had few blossoms -- and thus little fruit -- because of the weird weather, so we're delighted to see the trees all in bloom this year!

My Spleen Is A Beautiful Thing

2013-05-16T11:08:00-04:00

Well, after an anxious month waiting to find out, we had some great news yesterday from Widget's follow-up ultrasound. Our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Tanya Donovan, found that the two suspicious growths in Widget's spleen had not changed at all during the time, so there was nothing we needed to worry about at this point. Tanya said, "She's good to go!" That was an incredible relief. I placed a very happy phone call to Alayne a few minutes later. Neither of us had quite realized just how tense we had been for the past month, worrying about this. Suddenly, it was over and we could relax.

As for Widget, all she had to say was "Spleen, schleen. Where's lunch?"

Introducing ... Blind Darla!

2013-05-13T12:16:58-04:00

This beautiful girl arrived last week from Michigan, and wow, what a doll she is. Her name is Darla and she is a real love -- so affectionate and sweet. We don't know how long she's been blind from her cataracts, but judging from how tentative she is in her movements, we doubt she's been blind for very long. In fact, we suspect that without those cataracts she may be able to see, judging from how she reacted to a flashlight I shined into her eyes the other evening. I have a call in to our ophthalmologist about scheduling an electroretinogram (ERG) to determine if she would be a candidate for cataract surgery.

Darla is smaller than she appears in the photo, just under 50 pounds. She gets along great with everyone, and is a girl who loves to wag her tail as soon as she realizes we're about to love her up.

The story behind her is both interesting and maddening. We had agreed to take her in February 2012, after she had been found wandering in an industrial area and left unclaimed at the county animal control shelter for weeks. Just a couple of days before our transport was due to pick her up, her owner finally showed up and demanded the shelter return her. The shelter director declined, given the fact that a) the owner had somehow left her -- a blind dog -- to fend for herself, b) had failed to search for her and left her for weeks unclaimed, and c) we had already agreed to take her and had paid for her transport.

Well, as it turned out the owner was also a county employee, and he called a county commissioner and the county administrator to complain that the shelter was not giving the dog back. The county administrator ordered the shelter to return Darla, which they reluctantly did.

Fast forward a year.

Another person brought the same dog back in to the shelter last month, and the staff recognized Darla as the dog they were forced to return to the original owner the previous year. You can tell where this is going, right? The owner who fought to get her back subsequently moved and, naturally, didn't want to take Darla with him. He gave her to friends ... who eventually took her to the shelter and signed her over.

The shelter contacted us as soon as she showed up, and we agreed -- again -- to take this sweet girl.

So now Darla is finally safe with us, where she gets a whole new start in life, thanks to our wonderful donors!

Caring For Blind Horses

2013-05-10T07:32:10-04:00

Last fall I did a lengthy interview with a writer from The Horse magazine for a feature story on blind horses. The article ran last November but was behind a paywall on The Horse website until just recently. That's a screenshot above, and the link to read the full article is here. One of the other people interviewed extensively for the story is Dr. Ann Dwyer, a New York state equine veterinarian who is the leading authority in the veterinary world on how to care for blind horses. She's been a long-time friend and supporter of the sanctuary, and someone I was delighted to meet at conferences over the years.

It's nice to see our overall message about blind horses -- that they can still have a wonderful quality of life -- getting out in the equine media again.

I Can Do This Too

2013-05-08T07:41:21-04:00

Bentley our once-blind Yorkie apparently heard that Wilbur got plenty of points for the "cuteness factor" with his tongue sticking out all the time, so he's showing us he can be just as darn cute with his tongue. We had to do about $700 worth of oral surgery on Bentley while he was still with the rescue group in Louisiana because his mouth was such a mess. He had lots of teeth removed in the process, allowing room for a free-flowing tongue to escape. So what he lost in teeth ... well, yes, he made up for in cuteness.

It's Okay, I'll Just Help Myself

2013-05-06T07:24:28-04:00

She may be completely blind, but Lena knows there's hay on the utility vehicle -- and when I drive up into her paddock, she comes slowly trotting after it.

No, she's not going to run into it -- she can tell exactly where she is, relative to the vehicle, by the sound. And Lena's a smart girl, so she slows down when she realizes she's close, then walks gingerly up to it.

Her moment of opportunity comes when I've stopped to fill up Cash's water tank in the adjacent paddock. Unlike Cash, she's not interested in exploring the manufacturing quality or engineering skills behind the Kubota RTV. Lena wants a head-start on the hay, and she knows it's waiting in the cargo box. So while I'm dispensing water to Cash, she's self-dispensing hay to herself. I said she's a smart girl, eh?