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Storytime

In the end, we ran Oak Meadows Pet Resort for about 16 years. We never regretted our decision to carry on.

How lucky were we, to spend years amid thousands of dogs and cats of all sizes and breeds?

Patting a Bengal or Egyptian Mau cat was like patting a tiger.

Once we decided to stay in this life, we made a conscious effort to relax our attitudes. We focused more on the joy the dogs and cats brought us and the warmth of our relationships with clients who did appreciate what we were trying to do. We ended up making many friends through Oak Meadows.

We still made sure people who came late or early knew that such behaviour was unacceptable, but we went for more snark and less livid rage.

One year we got an email from a prospective client inquiring about booking her two dogs for about two weeks in May while she got married and went on her honeymoon. The email was received on March 1st. She also wanted to come out for a visit. I replied the same day, explaining at length our conditions for accepting a booking, and the limited times at which we did visits.

We made the decision to sell because we didn’t know how to go on. The exhaustion and anxiety about finances made it difficult to manage the stress. We were on our last nerve. When we went off into epic rants to idiots who should have been ignored, we knew we were overreacting. We just couldn’t seem to stop ourselves from venting our overwrought emotional state.

In the midst of our own exhaustion, running away to something else seemed irresistibly attractive. The answer to what we would try next was an impenetrable enigma. Yet, hard as it was to try to unravel that enigma, thinking about it still seemed a more palatable alternative than just going on as we were at that point. It at least engendered a fragile sense of hope.

All of our efforts had brought us back full circle to the day four years previously when I had returned from that partners’ meeting and we decided we had to reinvent our life. This time however, we were both unhappily aware that no fresh path was presenting itself to us. Nothing was inspiring a burst of creative energy.

In the winter of 1998-1999, when we were building the kennel, we had had record snow accumulation from frequent storms. In the winter of 1999-2000, we had had record cold, so much so that our septic had frozen. The winter of 2000-2001 brought yet more extreme conditions. This time we had so much snow followed by melts and days and nights of freezing rain, which were then followed by freezes, that there was an ice pack everywhere about 12 inches thick, more in some places.

Our porch door stopped opening. John frequently had to use a pick axe to chip away the ice around the gates in the play yards so that we could get them open. We could no longer sit on the benches in the outside yards, as the ice pack was level with the seats. Of course, we were also falling frequently on the ice.  

In February of 2000, I had the unhappy job of doing our year-end books of account for 1999, our first full year in operation. On paper we had made a profit. I realize that some people would say that for a new business after only one year and a bit in operation this was really exceptional. Our occupancy rate was 85%. Eat that ABKA and your “Maybe if you’re really good, you’ll average 60%”.

Of course there was the uncomfortable fact that our debt load was so high that our cash flow was still not meeting our outgo. So maybe the ABKA had a point? 

Having done the year end books, it was time to tackle the taxes. Once again, we got the bad news that we owed money. We had to cash $36,000 in RRSPs to take care of that. Our savings were pretty much exhausted. We would soon be living on our credit cards.

The phone never stopped ringing. By August, we were not just filled up for most of the Christmas period, we were already overbooked for two days at that time. 

All that water we had received in the form of snow and then spring flooding had provided the perfect breeding ground for blackflies and mosquitos, which were out in force. No one, including the dogs, wanted to be outside, especially as it got warmer. You could drench yourself with bug spray, but they still managed to buzz around you like little imps of hell, getting in your eyes and ears. John remarked that it was the only time he was actually happy to have to wear hearing aids, as they blocked access to the gnats.

Unlike my idealised fantasies, the dogs were not always frolicking happily together. Some would stand at the gate and bark mindlessly, loudly and constantly the whole time they were out. Some would jump up on us repeatedly and rake their claws down our backs. Some would test the fence line to see if there was a way to get out of the yard. Some would dig holes, either at the fence line, or just in the soaking ground. Some would snap at any other dog that came within touching distance of them. Some would obsess over some other particular dog and try constantly to hump their chosen victim.

We started to get visits from local kennel owners. We were on our guard the first time it happened. But unlike Kennel Boy, they were all really nice, friendly and supportive. One generous woman opined that having a new and different kind of kennel was a good thing as it would make all of the other kennel owners step up their game. Of course, she could afford to be generous. She had just sold her kennel.

This lady insisted that we didn’t need to subdivide our cat room; that the cats could simply roam around the cat room together. This was how they did it at her kennel.

She then proceeded to tell us of the occasion when one of their staff had neglected to close the window in the communal cat room when they left for the night. The cats got the screen off and they all escaped. Some came back, they managed to find others, and some were never seen again.

One elderly lady whose cat escaped, came around for weeks and sat out on the front lawn, hoping her cat would see her and return. The kennel owner felt terrible of course, so she would go out and chat with the client, offering her tea or lemonade.

A woman called on a Friday that June. We’ll call her Mrs. Daft. She had a dog she wanted to board for the weekend, starting right away. It was 5 p.m. It was 32 degrees, we already had 24 dogs to be walked three times a day, plus I had spent several hours of my ‘free time’ baking dog biscuits. I was exhausted. I knew John would have said no, and that fortified my own resolve. I told Mrs. Daft that we couldn’t take her dog. Then she played her trump card. She had been referred by a good friend of mine from my law firm days. With an inward groan, I decided I had to say yes.

Mrs. Daft said they’d bring Max, a mixed breed dog, at 6 p.m. In  accordance with our new policy, I told her firmly that we would be closed between 5:30 and 7 p.m. 

“That’s no good”, Mrs. Daft informed me.“We will have to be there at 6:30”.

I again said no. They must wait until 7:00. She reluctantly agreed. We staggered back to the house to rustle up some supper. At 7:00 p.m., we returned to the kennel, expecting our new arrival to be sitting at the locked gate, panting with eagerness to get in. Or, going by previous experience, climbing over the gate.

My head was still full of the need to find some way of getting the word out; to generate interest in our new endeavour and get those bookings rolling in. The Ottawa Kennel Club venture had been a dead loss. The Yellow Pages ads were good, but they weren’t enough.

The internet was barely on our radar. We did get a rather primitive website up and running, but hardly anyone contacted us through that. Google had just been incorporated as a privately held corporation the year before. At that point it was little more than a gleam in Sergey Brin’s eye, and certainly no one was using it to promote their business.

We decided to hold an Open House. We got our trusty design firm to produce cute postcard-like invitations and mailed them to every vet, groomer, breeder and pet store we could think of, as well as the people who had left their names and addresses for follow up at the Ottawa Kennel Club show. We sent invitations to friends, family and neighbours; basically, anyone with a pulse whose name we knew and whose address we could find.