Veterinary Care, Natural Approaches to Health and Healing
Animal Behavior
Know where every animal is all the time with Ceres GPS tags!
Health Exams
Behavior Consults, Nutritional Approaches to Health and Prosperity.
For urgent care advice and procedures purchase the Kindle version of the Dog First Aid book linked to the right or below for immediate life-saving guidance. For appointments, schedule online, as you and your pet or horse please. My goal is to orchestrate and fulfill a happy, healing experience for both you and your animals.
"Holistic Veterinary Services Dr Sid Gustafson provides animal-sensitive physical examinations, nutrition consults, and behavior assessments in quiet animal-friendly settings. Growing kittens, foals, and puppies will forever benefit from Dr Gustafson's natural health and behavior guidelines. Assure your animal companion a lifetime of health and behavioral happiness utilizing scientifically-validated feeding regimens that rely on fresh, nutritious foodstuffs. The right nutrition for your individual horse or pet resolves many diseases and promotes graceful aging. Fulfilling the social and nutritional needs of your kitten, puppy, colt, or filly makes training easy and enhances your personal health and happiness."
Behavioral fulfillment and enrichment strategies.
Poems, stories, holistic animal health guidance
Zoom Telemedicine appointments to help guardians assess and help resolve unwelcome behaviors.
Nutrtion consults to help manage a wide variety of diseases. Guidance to provide appropriate nutrition with fresh, wholesome diets, including homemade, raw, canned, and/or combinations thereof.
Swift Dam
Goodreads review by Simon Campbell
Sid Gustafson's spiritual journey deep into the wilderness of Montana and the wilderness of the past is a lyrical meditation on man and nature, time and memory and life and death (and life after death, both the supernatural and the natural, in man and in beast). This modern-day folktale is told from the interwoven perspectives of two men whose past and future bend around each other like the rivers and mountains of the landscape they inhabit, one coming to the end of his journey (one last vision quest) and the other just beginning to find his way. This is an evocative, sometimes haunting and always beautifully written novel, a timeless and wistful fable of the washing away of the old to make way for the new in common with another well-known flood story. Gustafson is an excellent writer and an excellent storyteller (and it's an increasingly rare treat to find both skills on display in the same novel) who slowly draws you into the lives of his characters and the country they share a deep bond with. Highly recommended.
In Prisoners of Flight, Sid Gustafson's veterinarian protagonist refers often to angels: "We haven't heard from our angels in a long time. But they're out there . . . waiting somewhere in the sky."
Two ex-military pilots, Gustafson's protagonist and his comrade, Henson, crash their plane into wilderness alongside Montana's Flathead River. Former Vietnam POWs, they have wrestled with life's trials ever since, holding to a single constant: a fierce longing for an idealized sky. Says Gustafson's protagonist: "The flying rule is: When in doubt, do nothing. But I'm not flying anymore." For indeed, Gustafson's characters are themselves fallen forms of the angels they seek.
Gustafson (B.S., D.V.M. '77) manages both an economy of words and a compelling lyricism. There's a rhythm here that makes for a read difficult to interrupt. And he's not afraid to toss the rules. Single-word sentences. Pop phraseology. Recurring metaphors. The result is a harrowing adventure part magical realism (with a hint of psychedelia), part paean to the deep forest, part redemption chronicle, and part cryptogram.
Gustafson strands his characters with only a river shack for shelter. Soon, twin sisters—"two breathless earth cookies"—searching for their dog (named Hope—"lost Hope") emerge from the forest cold and bewildered.
The protagonist recalls how he and Henson communicated cell-to-cell as POWs—through tapping out a simple alphabetic code. They repeatedly refer to this "old dance," often lapsing into it. Acutely aware of their frailties and failures, they call often on God. And while longing to be back in the sky, they fool themselves like lost boys whistling in the dark that happiness can be found on the ground: "Our earthbound angels can't stop smiling. And we thought they only lived in the constellations of our skyblown minds."
The narrative dealing with Henson's fate is both mythic and sad. (I'm not giving away much here, since the first two words of Gustafson's novel are, "Henson's dead.") Finally, the protagonist's escape and redemption are pulse-pounding.
There is much that is satisfying about Prisoners of Flight. Best is that it ends, as all good prayers do, with a single word, tapped out in code:
"Amen."
- Brian Ames '85, author of Smoke Follows Beauty (Pocol Press, 2002), Head Full of Traffic, (Pocol Press, 2004),and Eighty-Sixed (Word Riot Press, 2004).
Outside Bozeman Book Review by Corey Hockett
Sid Gustafson offers us a powerful glimpse into a unique and unfamiliar world in his new novel, Horseracing in America (Sleipnir Publishing, $17). Seen through the eyes of a female Native American woman, the reader is taken on a behind-the-scenes journey into the scandalous realm of horseracing. Laced with themes of bribery and corruption, Gustafson unveils the not-so-glamorous side of a widely popular pastime. From the mistreatment of animals, to the injustice of the American political system, Gustafson grapples with concepts that apprise readers to check their moral compass. Expressively written, with exciting dialogue and compelling character development, Horseracing in America brings into question our society's ethical animal principles, and is nothing short of an eloquent call to action.
Sid's fouth novel.
Mary Scriver reviews Horseracing in America, a novel.
This book was not at all what I expected, though it is exactly what the title, "Horse Racing in America," says. It is about the scandalous treatment — MIS-treatment — of race horses who are routinely destroyed because of running drugged on broken legs. Oddly, there is no single horse who is the focus — rather, the animal we follow and fear for is a dog. Not just any dog, but a rez dog. In fact, I'm sure I've seen "Cowboy" on Sid Gustafson's websites. He and I are both in the small category of white writers closely associated with the Blackfeet reservation over decades. We crossed trails in the Sixties when Sid's dad was our veterinarian. The story called "Smallpox" is in part drawn from Bob Scriver. http://www.sidgustafson.com/disc.htm#.Xr6W1C-ZNoQ Lots of photos here.
I've followed Sid's writing for many years and reviewed previous books. I smiled to see he'd managed again to get Billy Big Springs into the story, a physically massive mentor of Sid's whom I also knew, but not so closely. Consult https://sidgustafson.blogspot.com/2016/05/#.Xr6ReC-ZNoQ which is a previous review about a different book with the same internal story-drive. Writers work this repeat, trying to resolve the inexplicable again and again.
This time the reader is led through horse anatomy, particularly legs, and the drugs used on horses, not so different from the drugs we have all become familiar with these days because of human addiction. Encagements of horses' heads with bits and tie-downs elaborated to control the horse have the ironic effect of making breathing near-impossible, especially when running. The cruelty and attempt to control made me think of a medieval woman who spoke too much, even as they led her to be martyred by being burned alive. When she continued to shout to the crowd, her captors screwed her tongue to the top of her mouth. These days Euros don't use such methods, which have remained part of the American obsession with control.
Reading this book during current political developments means it echoes with bribery, mafia schemes, semi-legality, evasion of regulation, perversion of science, and pretensions of grandeur. But that's not what shines through all this machinery. I'm not sure that even Sid realizes what he has written, as much in his subconscious as his intentions. It's again as extraordinary as "Moby Dick," the detail and passion of obsession so strong as to be seen as madness. In this version Sid names it "Dominion."
"Dominion came to haunt me, much as it had come to haunt Vallerone. I despise the liberty man has taken with dominion over animals. His animals. Ha. Folk desire dominion over goodness, and absurdly, dominion over all living things." It's in the Bible. But in the novel it is tied to veterinarians specifically through Herriot's use of a Bible quote for an epigraph of a book later than "All Things Bright and Beautiful", a book called "Every Living Thing":
"Be fruitful and multiply,
and replenish the earth and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth."
(Genesis 1:28, repeated again and again)
Today this dictum has been thoroughly challenged, not least by women who defy domination, which is why the second veterinarian character, the protagonist, is a defiant idealistic female who has a daughter rather than a son. The two veterinarians share a happier plot line, but it is not about falling in love — rather the search for identity, the hunger for meaning. Often Sid repeats his horse mantra, which is freedom, foraging and friends, as true of people as animals, as natural to the rolling grasslands of the rez as to the sea. This is not abstract, told in jargon when necessary, slanting metaphor when that works.
Much of the plot plunges briskly through the chapters by means of repartee. Abandonment of quotation marks works here without confusion, easily visualized, which suggests a translation to a movie, except that such a move would lose the lyric passages about place, which are crucial to the sense and senses of the story. Memories of the Montana east slope stand in contrast with the shore of the New York Finger Lakes where Sicilians run casinos that make living animals into electronic signifiers, bookkeeping wealth too easily manipulated.
Locating Vallerone's incarceration in a Veteran's Hospital means that men are as much victims of national dominions as are women, as much destroyed by territorial industrial revolution war as animals are by distorted competition. But there's little lecturing on the obvious. Just the overwhelming inner drive to understand what to do, to obey the compelling need to make the maimed whole again or at least give them dignity.
I looked up "Sleipner Publishing" and discovered that "In Norse mythology, Sleipnir (Old Norse "slippy" or "the slipper") is an eight-legged horse ridden by Odin. Sleipnir is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson." In other words, a horse of the gods, ironically more pedestrian than Pegasus, but, wow, can he run! Sid doesn't forget he has a Norse thread.
Somewhere I once read an anthropological report on a Blackfeet woman's specialty as a "horse doctor." When the men came back from war or hunting, exhausted and possibly wounded themselves, the women took the horses to water and clean and a particularly skilled woman checked each one for wounds she would pack with healing herbs. I think Sid read it, too, but I don't have a reference for it.
Don't underestimate this book, but don't forget that Sid provides many nonfiction work on the same subject.
Sid's latest novel
Washington State Magazine
Goodreads Reviews of Swift Dam
Swift Dam, reviewed in Outside Bozeman
Local author (and veterinarian) Sid Gustafson’s latest book, Swift Dam (Open Books, $7), is set against the real-life tragedy of the Swift Dam collapse in 1964, when 30 people died in dam collapses and flooding in northwest Montana. Gustafson tells the story of a veterinarian and his life, work, and relationship with the Blackfeet Nation. The vet, Fingers Vallerone, mourns the losses of not just the individuals but of a culture. Gustafson embodies the storytelling culture in his distinctive style of prose. The discourse is at times sparse, and yet at others curiously insistent. It is a fast read, but tantalizing threads leave you picking through them long after you have finished. Gustafson uses landscape as the language of the Blackfeet Nation, and his intimate knowledge and sense of place shines through. Gustafson’s text seems to be a man’s book about men, with a masculine, almost patriarchal tone that probably reflects its characters. —DEBBIE DREWS
Washington State Magazine Book Review summer '07
Horses They Rode
By Sid Gustafson '77
Riverbend Publishing, Helena, Montana, 2006
Midway through Sid Gustafson’s new novel, Horses They Rode, I found myself put in mind of all the second chances I have had. His take on the reknitting of family, friendship, and one man’s tumultuous life is such a story—a tale of second chances where hope effervesces across a storyscape of high country, horse corrals, drunkenness, and regret that seems, at moments, irresolvable. It’s a wholly American novel, for of course, America is a land forgiving of first mistakes—where a shot at trying again is fair and right.
Wendel Ingraham, Gustafson’s protagonist, is a ranch hand who has roamed Washington State’s Inland Empire, Idaho’s panhandle, and Big Sky Country on a multi-year binge, leaving a daughter and a broken marriage in his wake. A series of experiences, including encounters with a high-school sweetheart and with mentor, companion, and part-time Blackfoot medicine man Bubbles Ground Owl, leads to his sobriety and amends.
Wendel and Bubbles take jobs as hands on a ranch where they worked as youths. And this is where the novel cries its message in earnest. The protagonist is never so competent as when he’s reunited with his beloved horse. The symbiosis that is rediscovered between them, a language of faithfulness and trust, portends atonements awaiting Wendel. A gathering of horsemen and their mounts prompts language from Gustafson that is a gorgeous but gritty admixture of potential:
“Whoever they were, whatever breed of horsemen, they brought horses and they brought hope, hope that horses could revive a manifest heart.”
At the ranch there are additional reconciliations required of Ingraham. In their execution, he emerges whole, “. . . grateful for all the people who’d gathered to live the life they knew best, everything and everyone connected, men and animals, fishes and birds, grass, trees and stars.”
As in his first novel, Prisoners of Flight, Gustafson often joyfully eschews writing conventions. By turns, his forms are starkly tangible or cloaked in mythology. His prose is exuberant and accessible. Rhythmic, he often reads like a long poem: “Parents want their children with them, children of the land, something about having your children with you on the land, native children on native land.”
Horses They Rode is a one-sitting book. And it’s the kind of book about something important in a world full of books about unimportant things. People should like it.
—Brian Ames ’85
Practicing veterinarian and journalist Sid Gustafson’s new novel, Swift Dam (Open Books, $14.95) is a short but satisfying read. In telling the story of an elderly veterinarian who sits out one long night under the dam and recalls the day of the great flood 50 years earlier that wiped out a large Blackfeet community, Gustafson evokes the landscape and the lives of an area still devastated half a century after the flood. But, of course, the wounds go much deeper and are much older. And the mysteries surrounding the lives of the people are deep and entangled. Like Gustafson’s previous novels, Horses They Rode and Prisoners of Flight, this is a book that demonstrates personal empathy and a sure hand with image.
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Literary reviews and links to reviews
Montana Quarterly Magazine
Book Review by Justin Easter, Spring ‘07
Horses They Rode
By Sid Gustafson
Riverbend Publishing, 288 pages, $24.95
Bozeman author and veterinarian Sid Gustafson has the rare ability to take you from your seat and place you directly in his novel.
He accomplishes this in Horses They Rode not with the all-too-common literary tactics we are used to, but through the use of fascinating imagery. While giving the reader familiar points in Montana to use as reference, Gustafson Brings his readers into a different countryside than the one we see from our windows.
Gustafson brings his reader into a world where Indians and cowboys live together, and before the novel even progresses, the affect of this relationship, however strained, is evident to the reader. The nomadic qualities of Gustafson’s characters echo throughout the novel and resonate in any reader who has felt an itch for exploration.
If you are interested in opening a book that will captivate your imagination while encouraging introspection, you need not look further than Horses They Rode. You may put this novel down wondering about the spirit of the mountains, the relationships you have with people around you, or even the relationship you have with yourself. This is, of course, not surprising when you realize Gustafson is using his own experiences to masterfully shape his characters.
Expect to read one of the finer stories related to quickly dissipating Montana culture, and one of the most impressive novels written by a Montana author this year. Hold on to your emotions, because there will most likely be an instant when Gustafson is able to open your mind in a way that is truly fascinating.
Justin Easter
Christian Science Monitor
“Montana books” have been famously popular for a couple of decades,
but
some of the finest authors have aged and even died. Is that the end of
the genre? Emphatically NO, I’m prepared to say after reading
“Horses
They Rode” by Sid Gustafson.
This is a guy who was born here, grew up here, practices veterinary
medicine here, and raises his children here. He not only knows
Montana, he knows the Blackfeet Reservation. Sure, he’s hoisted a
few
with friendly drunks, but he’s also ridden in cattle drives, enjoys
lifetime friendships, and quietly cares for ancient graves near his
home ranch. He also has a Montana publisher, so you might not hear
about him back East.
This story is about race horses. None dies.
RECENT REVIEWS
HORSES THEY RODE TOPS CHRONICLE BOOKLIST:
The Chronicle contacted three book stores -- Country Bookshelf of Bozeman, Books and Music Ect. of Livingston and Vargo's Jazz City and Books of Bozeman -- for suggestions of books by local authors that would make good gifts, or at least local authors who have been in high demand among customers.
Listed below are some of their recommendations.
"Horses They Rode" by Sid Gustafson. Riverbend Publishing. $24.95. The newest novel by the Bozeman author and veterinarian tells the story of Montana native who returns to the ranch where he was raised. Much of the story revolves around the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park. The work has received a thumbs up from Jim Harrison of "Legends of the Fall" fame.
Praire Mary Scriver review
HORSES THEY RODE by Sid Gustafson
1. Brakeman: The ride with the realbear
2. The Horse Medicine Man: Drinking with Bubbles
3. Outdoorsmen: Browning alley drinking
4. Red Man: Jesse James takes them to the ranch
5. Journeymen: Mabel and recovery
6. Studman: Rip, racehorses, and the son, Paddy
7. Grassman: Riding with Paddy
8. Other Men: Continental drift
9. Woman: Gretchen and cows
10. Wolfman: The wolf who drank with the cows
11. Lady’s Man: Making love
12. Ranch Man: Rip the boss
13. Lineman: Struck by lightning
14. Hiwayman: Driving to Spokane
15. Marathon Man: The race track
16. Legman: Doc the adulterer
17. Gentleman: Dealing with Willow
18. Newman: Wisdom from Bo
19. Milkman: Trish
20. Hiwayman: Homebound
21. Mystery Man: Nan comes aboard
22. Fireman: Back at the ranch
23. Middleman: Between wolf and dog, living in Palookaville
24. Gambling Man: Horserace
25. Mountain Man: Calling from summit
26. Weatherman: Rain and waiting
27. Horsemen: The race
28. Earthman: Burying Bubbles
29. Man: The Horse Medicine Bundle
Above is a list of the chapter titles of “Horses They Rode” by Sid Gustafson. It is immediately clear that this book is about what it is to be a MAN. It is also clear, even on the surface, that this is a Montana book. Sid grew up not far from where I’m living in Valier, the publisher is in Montana, the story happens mostly in Montana, and much of it is about Blackfeet, whom Sid can describe gracefully and honestly. So what is it REALLY about? I’d say it was about what it takes to be a mensch in a modern world that presses competition, toughness, ownership and emotional isolation as the measure of men. The final message is that real men are about nurturing: caring for those around them whether people, animals or grass. A natural conclusion for an author who is a veterinarian and a father.
One of the blurb reviews (by Neil McMahon) says that when he first began to read he was “taken aback, then disturbed.” After fifty pages he was drawn in and “humbled.” I had the same reaction, probably because the first chapter was written as a short story (much like Judy Blunt’s “Breaking Clean,” first chapter) and then the novel grew out of it. The first chapter is a picaresque, an exploit, a rather unlikely tale about a guy who jumps a freight out of Spokane in order to get back to the Blackfeet Rez and who is joined by a grizzly craving wheat residue in his boxcar. They don’t ship wheat in boxcars. Still, the grizzly, which in Blackfeet language is called a “real bear” in the same way that buffalo are “real meat,” acts like an actual bear.
The hero acts like 007 and climbs to the top of the train, then works his way back intending to get into the caboose, but this is after they stopped towing cabooses. There’s just a little digitized blinking box. The bear is “she” and Wendell’s reaction is to pray to the Virgin Mary. This discussion of “real men” is going to include relationships to the fe-male. And his daughter, rather than a lover or mother, is the key. But in the second chapter, Wendell is drinking at the Browning depot with an old Indian friend, so this is going to include red-men as well. But the Indian is not the key -- it’s the six-year-old daughter who brings the real delight and the son who brings the moral measure in that twelve-year-old straightforward way.
The plot is simple and the ending is pretty predictable, but Sid’s telling of the story, once he’s on the way, is extraordinary, laced with poetry and mythology, geology and anthropology. He’s as comfortable with image as with science. What he does NOT do is agonize over psychology. He’s hurting, he comes home, home is a place where everyone nurtures and heals each other, he finds his children, and he buries his good friend, a final kind of nurturing -- imperfect as things can be. Simple.
The language is extraordinary: lumpy, sometimes puzzling, grammar every which way, vernacular and poetry blurring into each other, medical terms when needed, fancy references (St. Wendell is the patron saint of wanderers and wolves.) It’s the sort of writing that makes some people sniff that it ought to have had a good editor -- and other people laugh that proper editing would ruin it! Sid is an original. (Montana NEEDS originals! Our supply is low.)
Nevertheless, since I’ve been in this country (off and on) almost as long as Sid’s been alive, and happen to know his family sort of from a distance, he came by all this stuff honestly, genetically and through nurturing. His sibs are equally extraordinary because the parents are larger-the-life, Vikings, massive and extravagant, and yet benign, inclusive. They don’t crush everything around them as some people in Montana certainly try to do.
But neither are the people in this book easily captured. The crushers want insurance, ownership, a sure thing. Sid’s book outlines an intimacy that is tolerant, allowing people to stay individual, keep their boundaries, make their own decisions. He’s willing to take chances. A real man meets his obligations but it appears that they center mostly on fatherhood, not good old dependable, chained-up husbandhood. There’s no husbandman on this list of chapters. Maybe he’ll explain in the next book. Sign me up in advance.
One of the key things that struck me is that though the main character is a veterinarian, there’s almost nothing here about drugs or surgery. (Sid’s practice emphasises natural medicine.) Healing is “hands-on,” rubbing, feeling, smoothing, connecting. When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy, a woman was dying. One of her symptoms was aching legs. Her husband stood by the bed hour-after-hour, patiently rubbing her legs which she said helped more than any medicine. It was about love. So is this book.
Preview by Ronda Clark, D.V.M.
First Aid for the Active Dog
As a veterinarian and canine performance exhibitor, I think many exhibitors would benefit
from and appreciate first aid information that they can have at their fingertips.
I found Dr. Gustafson's text, First Aid for the Active Dog, to be just the ticket for
referencing information quickly and easily, especially when one is traveling with
a dog and a vet isn't readily accessible. With just over 110 pages, the book is
small enough to put in a training bag or pack. Before discussing the causes, signs, and
treatments for individual diseases or injuries, the first four chapters give ex-
cellent insight into accident prevention, securing the scene of the accident to
prevent further harm to dog or owner, restraining and examining injured or
sick dogs, and taking and evaluating vital signs. Gustafson also includes muzzling tech-
niques, normal heart rates, respiratory rates, normal pupil size, and response
evaluation. Subsequent sections cover primary body systems and are
further subdivided into more particular chapters addressing specific problems:
vomiting or diarrhea, wounds and bleeding, exposure to extreme heat or cold seizures.
Throughout the book, many photographs and illustrations show techniques
for restraint and handling of injured dogs. FirstAid for the Active Dog is a
book suitable for most types of canine performance activities,
be it flyball or agility, hunting or hiking, fishing, or even search and rescue.
I found the book an informative addition to any dog enthusiast's library.
"Caution" boxes reiterate important points mentioned in preceding topics. Also sprinkled throughout the
book are captioned "Dog First Aid Tips" that stress situations that are likely be-
yond a lay person's expertise and encourage handlers to seek veterinary attention
as soon as possible. A common phrase threaded throughout the entire book is
"First, do no harm," a reminder that dog owners should not attempt to perform
procedures they are unfamiliar with, or administer medications that may not be
approved for use in dogs.
Each chapter lists:
* Common causes
* Frequent signs and symptoms
* Prevention suggestions
* Treatment options and recommendations
The last seven chapters discuss environmental dangers, including insect bites
and stings, snakebite, porcupine quills, fishhooks and lines, hypothermia and
frostbite, heat stroke and dehydration. First Aid for the Active Dog is a book
suitable for most types of canine performance activities, be it flyball or agility,
hunting or hiking, fishing, or even search and rescue.
I found the book a professionally written informative addition to any dog enthusiast's library.
Ronda Clark has been a small animal veterinarianin Texas since 1986. She started
competing in agility in 1996 and has put Masters titles on three Cairn Terriers and
a Miniature Poodle.
Clean Run magazine book review
February 04
First Aid for the Active Dog
A book by Sid Gustafson, D.V.M.
By Ronda Clark, D.V.M.
As a veterinarian and canine perfor-
mance exhibitor, my fellow exhibitors
often ask me questions about their canine
teammates’ health, and especially about
health problems their dogs are having
during a competition weekend. Although
I am always happy to help when needed,
I think many exhibitors would benefi t
from and appreciate fi rst aid information
that they can have at their fi ngertips.
I found Dr. Gustafson’s text, First Aid for
the Active Dog, to be just the ticket for
referencing information quickly and eas-
ily, especially when one is traveling with
a dog and a vet isn’t readily accessible.
With just over 110 pages, the book is
small enough to put in a training bag or
pack. The inside cover lists the contents
of a suggested fi rst aid kit that has nearly
anything a person would need to deal
with most minor canine emergencies.
Before discussing the causes, signs, and
treatments for individual diseases or
injuries, the fi rst four chapters give ex-
cellent insight into accident prevention,
securing the scene of the accident to
prevent further harm to dog or owner,
restraining and examining injured or
sick dogs, and taking and evaluating vital
signs. Clark also includes muzzling tech-
niques, normal heart rates, respiratory
rates, normal pupil size, and response
evaluation.
Subsequent sections cover primary body
systems (that is, respiratory, gastrointesti-
nal, musculoskeletal, and so on) and are
further subdivided into more particular
chapters addressing specifi c problems:
vomiting or diarrhea, wounds and bleed-
ing, exposure to extreme heat or cold,
seizures, and so on.
Throughout the book, many photo-
graphs and illustrations show techniques
for restraint and handling of injured
“First Aid for the Active Dog is a
book suitable for most types of
canine performance activities,
be it flyball or agility, hunting
or hiking, fi shing, or even search
and rescue. I found the book an
informative addition to any dog
enthusiast’s library.”
dogs, and “Caution” boxes reiterate im-
portant points mentioned in preceding
topics. Also sprinkled throughout the
book are captioned “Dog First Aid Tips”
that stress situations that are likely be-
yond a layperson’s expertise and encour-
age handlers to seek veterinary attention
as soon as possible. A common phrase
threaded throughout the entire book is
“First, do no harm,” a reminder that dog
owners should not attempt to perform
procedures they are unfamiliar with, or
administer medications that may not be
approved for use in dogs.
Each chapter lists:
• Common causes
• Frequent signs and symptoms
• Prevention suggestions
• Treatment options and recommenda-
tions
The last seven chapters discuss environ-
mental dangers, including insect bites
and stings, snakebite, porcupine quills,
fi shhooks and lines, hypothermia and
frostbite, heat stroke and dehydration.
First Aid for the Active Dog is a book
suitable for most types of canine perfor-
mance activities, be it fl yball or agility,
hunting or hiking, fi shing, or even search
and rescue. I found the book an infor-
mative addition to any dog enthusiast’s
library.
Ronda Clark has been a small animal
veterinarian in Texas since 1986. She started
competing in agility in 1996 and has put
Masters titles on three Cairn Terriers and
a Miniature Poodle. Ronda is currently
competing with a young Cairn and a new
Miniature Poodle, and has a young Aussie
in training.
Montana Western Professor Featured at Dances With Words
Monday, March 19 2007
The University of Montana Western English department is sponsoring a series of readings of area writers and poets during the 2007 Spring Semester titled “Dances With Words.”
The third reading features Sid Gustafson, Bozeman author and University of Montana Western professor of Equine Sciences, Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. in The Cup, located on the lower level of the Swysgood Technology Center.
Gustafson will be reading from his novel “Horses They Rode.” “Horses They Rode” is a dramatic story of love, family, and changing cultures.
“Gustafson has the rare ability to take you from your seat and place you directly in his novel,” said Justin Easter of the Montana Quarterly. “He accomplishes this in “Horses They Rode” not with the all-too-common literary tactics we are used to, but through the use of fascinating imagery. While giving the reader familiar points in Montana to use as reference, Gustafson brings his readers into a different countryside than the one we see from our windows. If you are interested in opening a book that will captivate your imagination while encouraging introspection, you need not look further than “Horses They Rode.” You may put this novel down wondering about the spirit of the mountains, the relationships you have with people around you, or even the relationship you have with yourself. This is, of course, not surprising when you realize Gustafson is using his own experiences to masterfully shape his characters. Expect to read one of the finer stories related to quickly dissipating Montana culture, and one of the most impressive novels written by a Montana author this year. Hold on to your emotions, because there will most likely be an instant when Gustafson is able to open your mind in a way that is truly fascinating.”
Gustafson is a practicing veterinarian and also the author of the popular guidebook, “First Aid for the Active Dog”. He is an authority on horses and was quoted in a New York Time’s story on Barbaro, the injured racehorse.
'Horses They Rode' full of linguistic gems
BOOK REVIEW
By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer
Meet Wendel Ingraham. Meet him slouched over in a Spokane train station, ready to flee the life he has botched and the wife who no longer appreciates "his thoroughbred ways."There among the bums and winos, Wendel doesn't look like much, and he knows it. He's a man who admits he is no better or worse than his malodorous companions.
But he's still got some hope. Wendel is going home to Montana, back to being a white man on the Blackfeet Reservation where he grew up. He knows it's his last chance."Wendel reckoned if he couldn't find happiness in Montana, he wouldn't find it anywhere," Sid Gustafson writes in the opening pages of his new novel, "Horses They Rode.
"Gustafson is a Bozeman writer and veterinarian. "Horses" is his second novel and the first piece of fiction published by Helena's Riverbend Publishing, making the book very much a Montana project.
Descended from a long line of accomplished Montanans, Gustafson uses his intimate knowledge of the state, its people and its horseflesh to create a compelling story of a man who has spent too much of his life battling his own well being, both financial and emotional.
But he's trying. By God, he's trying. And you've got to root for him, from the time he stumbles off a freight train in Browning until the climactic horse race at the end of the novel.
Along the way, Gustafson delights the reader with characteristic linguistic gems. He describes a prairie wind as "bending into trills and caterwauls." Columbia Falls is a town "befuddled by the stink of its aluminum mill."
And here's his description of modern agriculture, seen from the flank of a northern mountain, where Wendel has just been spooked by a grizzly bear: "Farming stared back at them from the plains, precisely rectangled, Mother Earth turned inside-out, scarred deeply and forever," Gustafson writes. "All the distance broken by farming, tillage taking the entire history away from the land, depriving it of any future."
"Horses They Rode" is the story of a flawed man trying to do better, trying to rebuild a life through family and love, through good horses and good friends in familiar country.
Wendel falters some, and learns to never quit trying. And he listens to his friend, a Blackfeet shaman named Bubbles Ground Owl. "Remember reliable things," Bubbles tells him. "Forget the unreliable."
That's good advice in any place.