Surf's Up In South Dakota

I went to South Dakota for two weeks with Best Friends Emergency Response team to help out at a temporary animal shelter. The shelter was created to serve those people and pets who were displaced by the flooding Missouri River in Pierre. If you click on the above image to enlarge it, near the center of the photo, you will see a small building . . . it is not supposed to be in the water, however the surface of the river is only a few feet from the roof. The trees on the far side of the river are about where the water's edge should be.

We were primarily there to serve personal pets who needed a place to stay while their people worked on relocating or drying out their houses. A few animals were surrendered to us and a few strays were brought in as well, but the majority of the animals went back home with their people. I was in the third team to go out for a two week deployment and we ended up closing the shelter at the end of our time there. I will write more later about the day-to-day stuff and the animals later, but I wanted to share these photos and a little information about why we needed to be there tonight. The river was so high in Pierre that the Army Corps of Engineers had to open the "Tubes" to drain water from above the dam down river so that it wouldn't flood over the dam. Several times since the tubes were opened back in late May, whirlpool were created above the dam and the tubes had to be closed a bit so that less water was flowing through them. According to our tour guide, who also happened to be the Incident Commander and a South Dakota local, the tubes were transferring 160,000 cubic feet of water per second! To give you an idea of what that means, according to Kurt, that rate of water flow would fill the Invesco Field, where the Denver Broncos play football, in approximately 1.4 seconds!!

Each of the tubes was about 15 feet in diameter, I think. Kurt said after they were opened, they had to be closed back down again temporarily because they hadn't been used before and there was a lot of muck and debris (like whole trees!) that they needed to clear out so the water would flow better. The rumble and vibration was incredible. As you can imagine, water flowing at this rate has a lot of power. The river bank used to come straight out from the end of the walkway in this shot, the bank has eroded this much in five weeks! It was very humbling to see all the destruction one little river can cause. (All photos copyright Allison Martin.)

Guilty 'Til Proven Innocent

I try not to use my blog as a soap box too much, but it is my blog and I can do what I want, so I am dragging out the soap box today.
There is a documentary about breed discrimination and pit bull type dogs coming out this winter called "Guilty 'Til Proven Innocent". Breed discriminatory legislation makes my blood boil and the perception of pit bull type dogs that has been created by the media is completely inaccurate. The first trailer for the documentary has just been put up on Youtube and they have a Facebook page for the film as well. Their goal is to get a million views on Youtube and a million likes on Facebook. Since I don't have a Facebook account, I decided to do my part here. If you are so inclined to view and/or like, here are the links.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFluwBz9ICo - The trailer is very graphic in the first 30 seconds but the remaining three minutes are very interesting.
http://www.facebook.com/GuiltyTilProvenInnocent - There are some rather stupid comments from some of the more rabid, militant type animal activists, don't hold them against the film.
Okay, I am done with the soap box, thank you for your patience.
Have a wonderful day!

Holy crap, a new post!!!!

I know it has been a while . . . sorry about that. Things all sort of blur from one day to the next and it doesn't seem like there is much interesting stuff to talk about. I kept meaning to post stuff, but it all seemed like more of the same stories over and over again and I just didn't feel like finding new ways of writing the same thing again. To cover the last six-plus months in a nutshell, I am still at the Garden. I have a new coworker named Deb and Jake is still there too. A lot of dogs have been adopted, some have been returned. The fall and winter have been very hard on DogTown, we have lost quite a few dogs and one dearly loved coworker. There are a lot of new faces in DogTown and several of the people I thought would be here forever have moved on to other things. It is weird to look around the staff room at meetings and realize how many people have come and gone in almost two and a half years. Day-to-day it seems like nothing ever changes around here but when I step back and look around, it seems like almost nothing is still the same.
So here is the promise I will make to whoever might still be checking this blog, I am not going to make any more promises to post blogs more regularly. I feel bad when I don't meet those promises, so, what I will do is tell you that when the mood strikes me or I have something interesting (for me) to write about, I will post. I have a few pretty exciting things coming up in the next few months, so hopefully - but no promises - I will have some inspiration to write.
It is in this spirit that I find myself writing today. As you might remember, last May a dog named Akila bloated and I was able to stay late and observe her surgery (it was only two posts ago). Not long after that evening, I asked about the possibility of spending a day observing in surgery. Immersion days are a perk of working at BF. If your managers will approve it, you may request to do an immersion day in pretty much any department at the sanctuary that interests you. It is a paid working day but instead of doing your regular job, you get to go see what it is like to do somebody else's job. It is especially nice for the people with office jobs that might not get to spend a lot of time with the animals. In DogTown, our managers encourage us to try and take immersion days occasionally. When they started talking about it, I immediately asked if I could spend a day in surgery. Construction on a clinic expansion was just beginning, so they weren't able to schedule it until this week. When they told me I was finally going to be able to do it, I had almost forgotten about it.
On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in the clinic observing surgeries and helping to prep and recover surgery patients. In the morning, they did two spays and five neuters on dogs and then after lunch they amputated a feral cat's front right leg.
The spays and neuters were very interesting. One of the dogs had some kind of infection in her uterus, so after it was removed we took some samples from it to make sure it wasn't anything serious. I won't get too graphic here, but let me just say it was very cool and very gross all at the same time! Two of the neuters were "crypt orchids" meaning that one or two of their testicles had not descended. One was a double crypt orchid, his testicles were basically where they were supposed to be except they hadn't ever dropped. The other one had one testicle that had descended and one that had actually migrated up into his abdominal cavity so the vet student doing his surgery had to look around for it a little bit. She had a lot of guidance from the vet, so she was able to find the testicle very quickly and the surgery went quite well.
The feral cat had injured his leg and it couldn't be saved (we do know what happened but it is rather graphic, so I will spare you the mental image). The amputation wasn't really that bad to watch, it was pretty cool actually. They did what is called a scapulectomy, meaning that they removed the entire leg including the scapula. This means they weren't doing any drilling or sawing of bones; they basically disarticulated the shoulder by cutting all the soft tissue that holds it in place. To be honest, the worst part for me was seeing the injury before they started the amputation, it had been a day or two since he was injured so the wound looked pretty nasty.
All in all, it was a very interesting day. The people with whom I worked were great and they really let me feel like I was part of the team for the day. I learned a lot and I would love to go back and do it again sometime.