It has been a bit of a week for blast-from-the-past stuff. I got an email from Tasha's mom saying that Tash is doing great and went to a place called Ewetopia to start learning how to herd sheep. This is a newer concept in the dog world, not sheep herding, but the facilities that let people bring their dogs to learn and practice herding sheep. It is a really good way to exercise a dog's brain and body and let them use some of the instincts that most dogs never get to use, except on neighborhood squirrels. Tasha did a really good job and was so exhausted by the experience that she fell asleep sitting up during the car ride home! Here are some photos from her day at the farm! (They are kind of blurry, but still cool!)
He got very sick about a month ago and required emergency surgery to remove his spleen. A tumor on his spleen had ruptured and was bleeding into his abdominal cavity, the vets were confident that they had gotten all the visible tumor but because of the rupture, cancer cells had been leaked into his abdominal cavity and it was only a matter of time before they invaded another organ. Last Thursday he was out on a walk with Megan and a volunteer had his run mate Tina Louise, it became quickly apparent that there was something seriously wrong, so Megan scooped him up (all 60+ lbs of him) and carried him to the clinic. They euthanized him shortly after he arrived at the clinic, but he was calm and peaceful for the process. He will be dearly missed but I am happy that he is finally at peace. There is a possibility that his run mate, Tina Louise, is going to be fostered and everyone has been very concerned about how Ronnie will handle the loss. Perhaps he knew what was coming and decided to take his leave with the full moon before winter set in, saying good-bye to Tina on one last walk.
(Not to be confused with Chico Rodriguez, who was adopted just before I left on vacation and is doing great in his new home.) RC, our puppy mill Shiba Inu, is slated to leave in the next couple of weeks, too. He broke tradition a little bit and chose his family instead of the other way around. He is quite shy, having spent the first four years of his life as a breeder in a puppy mill, he was never socialized with people. A few months back, a father and daughter came to volunteer for a few days at the Garden. Their first afternoon they went in a sat with Ruth and RC. Ruthie is an instant love bug, but RC tends to stay just out of reach, sniffing and watching from a few feet away. The 12-year old daughter went over and sat on one of the beds and after about ten minutes RC crawled up on the bed with her and cuddled up for a nap. The following night they took RC on a sleepover and then again the next night. After the second sleepover, they put in the paperwork to adopt him. And Moccasin, whom we like to call Karl, because he looks like Karl Malden, should be leaving the middle of next month as well. 
He is a very sweet dog and someone fell for him back in the spring but couldn't bring him home until September. We generally don't hold dogs for that long, so she was crossing her fingers for the last few months that someone else wouldn't snatch him up before she could bring him home. 
They tried her with an older shepherd mix because her run of three young hounds seemed to be a bit much for her at times and we were worried that their antics might injure Anahi, but after a few days she decided that she wanted nothing to do with him and let everybody know, so she is back with her hounds. Last week we had two dogs leave for their forever homes, a little pointer mix named Poinsettia. Her new family came to visit and took her on a sleep over and fell in love and put in the application the next morning after they returned her to the Garden and she was on a plane a few weeks later. We also had Grady leave, finally. He was originally scheduled for transport on June 5, but there was a mix up and it got postponed to June 19. Grady is at least the fifth run mate of a dog named Mercy to be adopted.
Mercy has been at BF for about a year now and seems to be a good luck charm for her roommates, they just keep flying out the door but she is still with us. We are all hoping that she will soon get her own family. We just introduced her to two new dogs and found out a couple of days later that one of them is already adopted, though I don't know when he will leave. We have had a couple of other big adoptions this week, Cupid, a sweet brindle pittie got adopted after a long time at the sanctuary and a shy boy named Ohio Patches also found a family after years of BF.
She didn't like other dogs and probably would not have been good with cats either, but she was so very sweet with people and would smile when she was excited - not just a happy little face but a full on lips curled up, teeth showing grin. As I mentioned in my last post, we were trying to lift her quarantine so that volunteers could, using the correct protections, walk her and spend some time visiting her. We were able lift her quarantine in the last week or so of her life and she went on several walks with volunteers. She had a lot of staff come to visit her leading up to her last day and so many people came to say good bye, it was a horrible moment that brings out the best in everyone in Dogtown. She had an appointment with Dr Mike on June 8 and he said, based on the size of her lymph nodes, she probably only had a week, maybe two. In fact, it was less than 24 hours after that appointment that we decided to let her go. The lymph nodes that are situated next to her windpipe were extremely swollen and at some point would begin to cut off her airway. When I came in the morning of the 9th she was laying on her bed panting in a building that couldn't have been more than 65 degrees. We made the phone calls and people started arriving to say their final good byes to Margie. She never lost her appetite, in those last hours we fed her about two and a half cans of wet food, an entire bag of duck jerky, a handful of chicken jerky, some Pupperonis, and who knows what else. So many people stepped up that day to help out, it was very comforting to know that when it really comes down to it, we look out for each other like family. We opted to keep Margie in her run at the Garden and Dr Mike said that he would come to us, the staff at the Fairway stepped in to help, one of them coming up to take over the Garden so that Skip, Carin, and I could just spend the morning with Marge, Jen, our trainer, came by to lend a hand as well and Don, a volunteer coordinator came over to help get the volunteers reassigned for the last hour of the morning so that we could shut the Garden down at 11 when Dr Mike would get there. I have gone through these losses too many times recently but this one was unexpectedly difficult for me. I realize now that up until Marge, I had never been involved in the decision making process. Niblet is the only Lodge dog that died while I was at the Lodges and I wasn't there the day they decided to let him go and all the rest of the dogs have been since I left the Lodges and the decision was up to the caregivers in the area. Marge, on the other hand, was in my area and I was part of the handful of people deciding whether to give her some more time or let her go, I was the one that made the call to Dr Mike. It was an incredibly difficult morning and I couldn't stop crying. Margie went out surrounded by the people she loved and before her condition got really bad, she may have been a bit uncomfortable, but she certainly wasn't in the pain she could have been if we had waited any longer. She was a good girl with personality coming from every pore and we miss her deeply. Marge's service was the following Tuesday at 11:30 in the morning. It was a beautiful service, filled with as many laughs as tears and the wind chimes weren't quiet the entire time.
Idaho went back to Old Friends, now that the quarantine for ringworm has been lifted from that area, and we got Marge back. Marge moved to the Garden from the Lodges when I was still working up at the Lodges (you may remember Margie from previous posts - she's the smiler) and then she developed ringworm and was moved to Old Friends with some other ringworm dogs (not in the same run) to try and contain the outbreak. 
Unfortunately, Marge has lymphoma and will probably not get rid of the ringworm because of her diminished immune system. But she is the last dog at the sanctuary that I know of to have ringworm and they decided to bring her back to the Garden because the dogs are mostly young and healthy and less likely to pick up an infection should they come in contact with the spores than many of the dogs at Old Friends. Marge is such a sweet dog and she has very little time left with us, but we will love and adore her until she is ready to go and we are working on lifting her quarantine so that volunteers may go in and be with her and walk her using the same protocols that the staff are required to use. In happier news, Simon and Oakley were both adopted last week. Simon went to Denver and Oakley went to the central Washington coast and we hear that both are doing quite well in their new homes. Valley Girl, Oakley's former run mate, has three new kids in her run to keep in line. She now lives with Poinsettia, a very sweet little hound that is a bit shy but very lovable; Tucson, a Rottie mix that is very playful and fun but a bit scared in new situations (during his behavior assessment he tried to climb out the window when he got scared); and Dana, a very cute red-brindle six-month old pup that looks like a jackal when he gets excited. 
For some unknown reason, Anahi prefers male hound dogs - in spite of their youthful play and crazy antics (Pilot is forever jumping on her head by accident) she seems content with them.
I have had too many of these posts lately. Dexter was euthanized yesterday after the onset of a bizarre set of symptoms about a week ago. Dexter was a Lodge dog, you may remember him from previous posts about hand feeding him to work on his issues with food aggression, he was sweet and a little nutty, but very lovable. Nobody ever thought he was as old as he was, people often thought him to be a young kid - three or four years old - everyone was always shocked to see that he was about eleven years old. He had so much energy and loved to play fetch, he would play fetch all day long if he could, balls, frisbees, anything that you could throw, he would try and fetch. He loved it! He also loved to eat sticks and juniper berries, the berries aren't toxic to dogs but they can't digest them, so they come out the other end looking pretty much the same as they went in - poop scooping in Dexter's run was always a bit challenging because of the volume of his berry intake . . . I'll just leave it at that. Prior to my arrival at BF, over the course of about six months everybody thought that Dexter was dying because every time he opened his mouth it smelled like death. They were filling out caregiver observation sheets on an almost daily basis and calling the vet techs when the smell would get really strong. He was acting just fine, eating regularly, playing, there were no physical symptoms other than the stench emanating from his mouth. After a while, he was scheduled for a dental and when they got into his mouth, they found a piece of rotten wood wedged between two of his back teeth. Never stopped him from eating branches after that, though.
Last week he started acting very strange, he was lethargic and wouldn't eat - this from a dog that would gorge himself on food until he exploded if given the chance. He collapsed on a walk, he didn't really loose consciousness entirely, just sort of fell over. He was taken into the clinic and they did an ultrasound. They could see a mass near his heart and some nodes on his liver, they did an EKG and took him for a walk to see if he would collapse again, but he decided to hold off on collapsing until about 3 minutes after they had taken the EKG sensors off. His behavior in the clinic made it clear that he was really not feeling well, in addition to not eating, he was a fairly willing participant in all of his diagnostic tests - this from a dog that usually required at least two people just to restrain him for anything remotely resembling a medical procedure. There wasn't really much they could do for him beyond putting him on Prednisone to see if the steroid would help. After a week of Pred his condition had not improved, he spent his days staggering around his run looking very confused. It was clear that his quality of life was way below our standards and it was decided to euthanize him yesterday afternoon. I had not seen Dexter for a few months but went up to spend some time with him and be there when they sent him over the bridge. He really wasn't the same dog that I remembered - very tired and clearly confused. He did have a last burst of energy before the vet arrived and decided to go out for a little stroll in front of the building. He wandered around, staggering like a little drunk, peed on a weed, and started wandering up the road that would have taken him back to his run. Megan stayed with him and when she blocked his way, he tried to fake her out, walking one way and then trying to quickly change direction and go around her, but his motor functions weren't so good, and the speed necessary for a successful fake out wasn't there. He made his way back to the kitchen and plopped himself on his bed, ready to go, it seemed. He will be buried with one of his favorite balls and we will miss him dearly. He was a long time resident of BF, it is always sad when they fail to find that forever home, but I think he was pretty happy. He got to play lots of fetch and go for lots of walks with our volunteers - he was well loved by everyone who knew him and will be remembered fondly.
She was in a home for a while, but was recently returned, she was exhibiting some dog aggression that the owner didn't feel she could manage. Karina is also healing from an injury incurred during her time in the home, she was out hiking with her family and a snowboarded came down the mountain and ran over Karina injuring one of her back legs. She is doing much better now and I have yet to see her limp on the leg. Her run mate is Reggie Boy, a Guardian Angel and Nat Geo dog that was surrendered by his owners because he has some severe medical problems (possibly Lupus) and, while they loved him dearly, they could not afford the medical costs associated with the diagnostics and treatment of his condition. 
He is very sweet and his face is healing up very nicely, but to protect him from the sun on his walks, in addition to sunscreen, he gets to wear a very stylish baseball cap designed for dogs - he's definitely a show stopper. Mercy is a very sweet border collie mix, full of energy but getting up there in years (about 9) and should really be in a home with a family to call her own. 
She is a great dog, a bit quiet and not a flashy as some of our other residents which means she tends to be overlooked by many of the people that come through the Garden on a daily basis. Grady only just arrived a week or two ago, brought to BF from a local shelter not far from here in a town called Enoch. 
When we have some unexpected space available, a trainer will drive out to Enoch and bring a few dogs to BF, helping to take some of the burden off this small, over loaded no-kill shelter (more on the story 
Her run mate, Oakley, was being fostered by one of the Dogtown maintenance guys until he had to move and could not take his fosters with him, so Oak came back to the Garden and won everyone over with his adorable charm. He is leaving on Friday for his new home in Washington. Ruth is the mother of Ester, another dog at the Sanctuary. 
She has a very sweet disposition and chocolaty, soulful eyes and just melt your heart. She is incredibly soft, almost like velvet and when you pet her against the grain of her coat it it like watching a wave roll across her body at the hair shifts back into place all on its own. She lives with Harley, a very cool Heeler mix. He is smart and funny and always trying to herd something - dogs in other runs, dogs out walking, people, he even tries to herd from inside the car, so we put him in a crate for longer car rides. He went on his first sleepover this week and the people loved him so much they put an application in on him as soon as the left from dropping him off. Unfortunately, he tried to taste the cat during his cat encounter, so he will have to wait a little bit longer for his forever home (the people that wanted to adopt him have five indoor cats . . . not exactly the best situation for a dog with Harley's herding drive).
some of you may remember me talking about Ophelia from the Lodges, well she and Hera are (probably) sisters, they came in as a group of three, the third being Pandora that I had over at Amra's. I am fairly sure, based on appearance and behavior that Hera and Ophelia are sisters, Pandora is very similar emotionally though she expresses herself a little more outwardly and she doesn't really look as much like the other two - perhaps the same mother and a different father? When I was here last summer, Hera was one of my sleepover dogs - though she didn't let me sleep much, seeing as how she wanted to sit on my head all night and lick me.
She did well for a while on her new meds, but it became apparent that she had some kind of cancer when she continued to lose weight in spite of the 2,000 calories a day diet that Jeanne was home cooking for her. She spent four months in Jeanne and Robin's home and she thrived with them. When she went to live with them, I figured she had maybe a month left at most, but then it all turned around. It was very sad to say goodbye to such a sweet girl, but it helps to know that she had those great four months Jeanne and Robin's home, they cared for her so deeply and with such love and devotion. After her bloat episode, they rarely left her home alone for more than an hour without a "sitter" to stay with her while they were out and Sage at better under Jeanne's care than you can imagine - when Jeanne would relate Sage's rotating menu, more than one caregiver asked if they could be the next in line to be adopted by Jeanne and Robin. Sage's favorite meal was bison sauteed with garlic, mind you Jeanne, a vegetarian, hasn't cooked meat for more than twenty years, but for Sage, anything! It is never easy to say goodbye - this I have learned over the last month - but knowing that she was so loved and happy and spoiled in her last months makes it so much better.
He moved up to the Lodges and I really hope that the higher number of volunteers up there (though not as high as the Garden and Fairway) will finally get him adopted. He is probably a boxer-pit mix, more boxer than pit, and he has a wonderful personality and great people manners, he just isn't a fan of other dogs.
He was an ornery little old man, but we all loved him very much. He is known throughout the sanctuary for his tendency to hump anyone caught unawares in his run, sometimes even ripping off articles of clothing - dirty old man! He had surgery several months ago and had to be kept in the bathroom (off the sand) for a few weeks until his incision healed; we always joked that, given the option, he would certainly have chosen the bathroom as his permanent residence over a run because in the bathroom he need not rip people’s clothes off - they did it for him. However his expansive collection of toys would have made it difficult to even find the toilet; he loved his stuffed animals and you could often find him holding court from his bed, a selection of his most cherished toys arranged around the run for him to admire. He was a good man, dirty, but good and it is heartbreaking to know that he never got to find his forever home and a family of his own.
He and I spent about ten minutes chasing each other around the run the other night on his potty break, he is just a hoot when he gets the 
Brenda, my project dog, and I went on a walk and spent some time working on her off leash recall at Tara’s Run, she did fantastic! 
Even if I was hiding, as soon as I started calling her, she would stop what she was doing and immediately start looking for me, she would get so happy and wiggly when she found me. She is doing really well with her training and I really hope we can find her a home soon. She got her first bath since she has been at BF this week, too. I think they had always avoided it because they thought she 
I hope it goes well, we don’t really know that much about how she handles dog intros, she came to us already living with Diego and the managers decided to keep them together because they can be difficult with other dogs. I have seen her get reactive on leash with other dogs, but that 
I haven’t really gotten to know him that well because she takes him to her office three or four days a week and usually on the days that she 
If she gets adopted, too, we are only going to be left with one shy dog and he is right on the brink of getting over his issues. Kathy has been working with him a lot and he is almost there.
and Beans is still showing off how smart he is (we are working on "High Five"), Ivy is cute and perplexing as ever, and Chowta is right on the cusp of becoming a confident and comfortable dog.
I don't know what will happen over the next few weeks, but I have spoken with one of my managers to let her know that I am not entirely happy with my new area. I told her I would give it some more time but that if there is someone else on staff that they think would fit at Amra's and that would really like to be over there, to just keep that in mind. During the meeting, I was also told that if I decided that I no longer wanted to be at Amra's there was no guarantee that I would be sent back to the Lodges. I will give it a few more weeks, but I spent so much time waiting things out up at the Lodges, questioning why I had come to BF in the first place and thinking about leaving, before things finally got really good up there, that I don't want to do that to myself again. For the better part of three months, thoughts of leaving and doing something else were regularly rolling around in my head and I am back at that point again at Amra's. I am just not willing to spend another three months here being unhappy and flat out miserable at times, so if after a few more weeks, things haven't really improved with my mood and feelings about Amra's, then I will go back to my managers and see if we can find a solution that will make everybody happy.
I miss being up there, and while they do very interesting work at Amra's, I just keep wishing I was up at the Lodges. The differences between the Lodges and Amra's are like night and day. Amra's is a single building that houses 22 dogs; it wasn't really designed to operate in the way it is being used, so instead of having free indoor outdoor access at all times, the dogs are kept in smaller runs (probably about 10x30 feet) outside during the day and then they are moved inside into crates over night. In the summer, it stays warm enough that the dogs stay outside all the time, but in winter, they come in at night and on really cold days they will rotate the dogs into the building throughout the day so they can warm up. All the outside runs have corrugated tin roofs over half and a dog house for the dogs to get out of the sun or rain. The staff to dog ratio is better than at the Lodges and the goal each day is for each dog to get at least a half hour of individual attention from a staff member or volunteer. I like the idea of having a lot of time to actually work with the dogs, but I was rather frustrated this week when there were four staff members working in Amra's from 2-5 pm one afternoon - four staff for twenty two dogs - up at the Lodges, save for two days a week when there are five, there are four staff for the entire population of both sides of the Lodges which is currently in the vicinity of 75 dogs. It made me want to walk out the door and head up to the Lodges for the afternoon. Granted, the event of four staff isn't that frequent at Amra's, but honestly, I feel like I would be of more use up at the Lodges.
It's hysterical, and when you take him out for a walk, he will sit at the door and wait for you to open it (something they teach all the dogs to do at Amra's - in theory anyway) and if you are taking too long to open it, he will start sneezing in an effort to get you to open it faster. It is one of those "Is this what you want?" moments when a dog isn't entirely sure what you are waiting for so they will start doing everything in their repertoire to get the reward.
