Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary

It Works For Me

I've posted before about Bailey's odd sleeping habits, whether it's snoozing with his mouth resting on a toy, or only having part of his body covered ... and sometimes only his face.  The other afternoon I saw him in the kitchen looking like this, and wondered once more:  why? 

Has he heard the line about how you lose most of your body heat from your head and taken it to heart?

Does his top half just get colder than his lower half?  (If so ... um, why?)

Was there something going on in the kitchen he'd rather not see?

Is it easier to fall asleep with your head covered?

Or is this just a fashion statement of some sort?

No other dog here, Dachshund or not-a-Dachshund, does this.  It's a peculiarly Bailey habit.  Your guess is as good as mine!

(Oh ... if it looks like something is coming out his rear end in the photo, no, that's just the tag from the West Paw bed that's turned up in the corner.  I did a double-take when I first loaded it on the computer ... what is that?)

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!

Sumo Wrestling Beagle Style

I had forgotten that Alayne had taken this photo of blind Austin and not-blind Charlie acting like Japanese sumo wrestlers the day before Charlie was adopted.  It shows you that tough little Austin was not about to let the bigger, and now seeing, Charlie, push him out of the ring without a real fight!  That's Austin on the left and Charlie on the right.

I don't have any photos of Charlie with his new family yet, but Julie emailed us recently to say Charlie was doing very well in their home with Hugo, their other Beagle.  She wrote that she had looked at some of our recent blog posts about our various Beagles and said two comments really stood out:

"'Beagles + food = trouble!', and 'Beagles are binary: on or off.'  Absolutely true!  Also true is that Charlie sleeps a lot, he snuggles down on one of the three beds of choice and snores his head off!  After lots of slumber Charlie gets up for his mad run around the house, and Hugo looks up at me as if to say 'What on earth....' I am not sure which is funniest; Charlie running around, or Hugo's face!"

Julie added, "Charlie and Hugo love their food, it is their reason for being.  Charlie already knows where the treats are kept, and he knows that going out to 'use the garden' constitutes a treat, and it won't be too long before he learns Hugo's trick: go out into the garden every five minutes, wait a while, come back in... get a treat!"

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!

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Another Online Shelter Contest:  We keep getting emails from people about Care2.com's America's Favorite Animal Shelter contest.  We do know about it but have decided not to promote it on the blog so we can keep everyone focused on the Shelter Challenge contest instead.  However, please feel free to vote for the ranch in this other contest if you'd like.  You'll need our zip code, which is 59854.

When Only The Best Will Do

I know, this is another impossibly cute Dachshund photo.  But the point of this post is not to showcase another impossibly cute Dachshund, but rather to highlight his expensive and fancy bed.  Yes, a $5.99 plastic laundry basket.

We discovered a while ago that the new favorite sleeping spot in the house was a laundry basket next to the washing machine -- and whether it had dirty clothes in it or not, they didn't care.  We would come through the back door into the laundry room and invariably find a dog sleeping in the laundry basket.  So we'd pick up the dog, pull the dirty laundry out and place it temporarily on the floor, put some clean bedding back in the basket, and replace said dog.  And it could be any of the dogs -- they all decided this was the best bed in the house.

Doing the repeated laundry swap-outs got very old very fast, of course.  Rather than swim against the tide, we bought a couple more of these cheap laundry baskets, filled them with fleece blankets that our friend Margaret N. in Seattle sends us, and distributed them in strategic locations. 

When I walked into the house on a recent evening, there was Dexter poking his head out of the basket in the dining room.  He also thinks that this is a great spot to hide out in before we have our dinner, because somehow we might not notice him buried in the bedding ... and then he won't get placed on the other side of the Barbarian's Gate.  Thus he can pop out in time to pester us at the dining table.  Dexter T. Dickens indeed.

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!

Jack Hanna's Program On The Ranch

Jack Hanna's Into The Wild show featuring the ranch will air beginning this Friday, November 6.  Depending on where you are, the program may air on Saturday or Sunday, rather than Friday, and at different times on different networks.  To find out the exact schedule, please check the Into The Wild Web site here.  It is not a national network program so it is not broadcast in every community.  In Montana, for instance, it is airing only in Helena, Missoula, Butte and Great Falls ... at 7:30 on a Friday morning!  On the schedule we're listed as Episode 306.  We have no information beyond what is posted on the show's Web site.

Rainbow Cottages

Here's our latest installment of scenes from "Rainbow Flat."  Alayne got this shot the other evening of another beautiful rainbow spanning the animal cottages next to our house.  We'd just had a rainstorm move through, going from west to east, and it was still shrouding the mountain range to the east of us behind those cottonwoods.

Speaking of which, we never really had fall colors out here this year with the cottonwoods -- the subzero cold we had a few weeks ago just killed all the leaves on the trees outright, turning them brown, so we missed the gorgeous yellow and orange colors we often see this time of year.  I guess our rainbows will have to make up for it!

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!

I Know I Look A Little Funny, But ...

This is blind Gabe, who is very happy finally to be completely finished with the side-effects from his radiation treatment -- and best of all, he is cone-free now!  You can see the hair loss on his face from the radiation field.  I had emailed a photo of Gabe's face several days ago to his oncologist at WSU, Dr. Janean Fidel, so she could see if this looked "normal."  She emailed me to say, "This does look pretty normal.  Gabe seemed to be a late bloomer with his reaction in that it all developed after he left."  As for regrowing of the hair, she said, "It will take awhile and it may not all grow back.  It tends to grow back lighter in color and sparser in texture."  Dr. Fidel added that in the areas that had the worst effects -- near the corner of the eyes and along the suture line in Gabe's case -- hair may not grow back.  But everywhere else, she said, "It will start to grow soon -- it won’t be complete for 6 months or so."

Gabe is just relieved that in the meantime, he still has all that luxurious hair to cover his big ears!

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!

Is She Home Yet?

I've posted about this once before, quite a while ago: blind Goldie's habit of patiently waiting outside for one of us to come home.  It doesn't matter whether it's Alayne or me who's away from the ranch -- she knows her "pack" isn't complete if one of us is missing, and she wants to stay outside, listening for the sound of the truck coming down the drive.  And she knows where the gate by the road is, and that's the direction she faces.  On Friday evening, I noticed her sitting by the front of the house, looking towards the gate, waiting for Alayne to get back home from New York.  As usually happens, I had to insist she come in out of the cold, damp weather; when she's on "sentry duty" like this, she becomes oblivious to the weather.

Yes, she's still wearing her camouflage foam e-collar; when we removed it recently, she went right back to working on the surgery site on her leg.  Oddly, she almost acted lost without her e-collar after we took it off her.  She seems to actually like the confounded thing, and uses it as a personal pillow for napping whenever she chooses.  Even better, it's great for blocking other dogs who may get in her way or impede her efforts to stay near Alayne (she's like Alayne's shadow).  It's kind of like the shoulder pads that American football players wear, but instead of making a "crunching" sound on contact, it's more of a soft "whoosh" sound as she brushes away the other dogs.  

But the only sound I heard when Goldie finally greeted Alayne that evening was "smooch!"

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Still No. 1!

Please keep voting for the ranch 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!