I do not subscribe to what seems to be a widely held view that dog and cat kennels are almost guaranteed to be terrible places, to be avoided at all costs. If you leave your pet at a kennel, these cautionary tales go, you are just subjecting him to crushing loneliness, illness, neglect and maybe even abuse. What kind of horrible person would do that?
“I would never leave my dog at a kennel. I’ve heard such terrible stories.”
The General and I created and operated a pet resort for sixteen years. ‘Our’ dogs and cats were lavished with love and attention. We had them outside or in the playroom for group fun three times a day, did homemade dog biscuits and tucked them in at night.
We walked them twice a day regardless of the temperature.
We have had personal experience of at least two other boarding facilities where we would not hesitate to leave our pets. We’ve known a handful of others that, if not places that your dog or cat would necessarily pull you in the door in their eagerness to get there, were at least safe, bright, clean and operated by caring people.
Dogs and cats inevitably get sick from time to time. They inevitably die. It is, sadly, the course of nature. The fact that your pet dies in a boarding kennel does not constitute proof that the kennel was at fault. Dogs bloat and die quickly. It can happen even when their owner is home. Accidents occur even when we take the best care we can. Dogs die in fires at home when their owners are not there. Dogs dying in a kennel fire when the owner is not there is tragic and horrible. But it doesn’t prove that the kennel owner is any more to blame than the householder for an electrical short.
As someone who was in the business, I can imagine what that kennel owner who lost boarding animals to a fire, is feeling. If, as we did, you go into the business because you love dogs and cats, anything that happens to any of your boarders makes you feel just as bad as you would if it happened to your own pet.
Add to your own sorrow, the burden of your sympathy for the owners’ grief and your feelings of guilt, no matter how unjustified. You remind yourself of the facts – it wasn’t your fault. But still somehow, in the court of your own mind, you can never be acquitted.
It makes negligence on the part of kennel owners all the more incomprehensible to me.
Like the old nursery rhyme, when a kennel is bad, it seems to be pretty much a disaster waiting to happen. All too often, when the risk of something going wrong does materialises, it results in unthinkable catastrophe.
When we decided to create a pet resort, we worried about whether we would have enough business. It never occurred to us to worry about having too much business.
As some sage once said, “It’s nice to be popular but hell to be the rage.”
Our clients were, by and large, loyal. Really loyal. As in, they would call and ask us whether we had space for their dog or cat before they booked their own vacation. We fell in love with a lot of the dogs and cats, especially those who kept coming for years and years.
That is the face of a happy General.
When we couldn’t accommodate any of ‘our’ dogs or cats, we had almost as much angst as their owners did, thinking of them in a kennel that potentially would not love and understand their quirks the way we did.
Our angst was justified on occasion, but perhaps never so much so as with Doug the Siberian.
I feel confident in saying that all Siberians are prima donnas and drama queens. This is why they both drive their owners mad and engender fanatical devotion. They are hilarious, metaphorically clutching their foreheads and literally howling in anguish if they’re asked to take a bath, or not take a bath or come in from playtime. In the Siberian world, a huge tragedy is when you are asked politely to do something and – horror of horrors, you don’t particularly feel like doing it.
It’s amazingly like opera, only with fewer wigs and more howling.
The long weekend at the beginning of August was one of our peak demand times. People who vacationed from the middle to end of July were not back until the end of the long weekend, and lots of people wanted to start their vacations near the end of July, just before the August long weekend. This resulted in lots of overlapping bookings and a terrible scarcity of rooms. You had to book months in advance at Oak Meadows to get any dates that included this weekend.
One year, Doug’s owners (we’ll call them Veronica and Archie) were late in applying. We had already overbooked ourselves to the point of insanity. We would be putting up dogs in the playroom, the kitchen and any other nook and cranny we could find. We were out of options and we couldn’t in good conscience take even one more booking, even for a dog we loved like Doug.
Reluctantly, Veronica finally accepted this. She asked instead what was the first day we would be able to take Doug for the balance of the time in question. I said the Tuesday after the long weekend. “Well, in that case,” she asked, “if I booked Doug into another kennel, would you be willing to go and pick him up on that Tuesday morning and keep him for the rest of the period?”
I said sure, as long as the other kennel agreed. Veronica called back after a bit to say she had gotten Doug in at the Kennel of The Temple of Doom, and they were fine with us picking him on the Tuesday in question.
The General and I exchanged looks and shudders.
We never volunteered our opinion about any kennel unless we were directly asked.
In the first place, different people have different opinions and different priorities. We had heard some of our clients speak well of other kennels they had used when we couldn’t take their dogs, even though we had heard contrary opinions about that kennel from other clients.
In the second place, sometimes there just was no other choice so why make people feel bad in advance and add to their anxiety?
Besides, we didn’t feel it was within our brief to talk trash about our competitors to our clients or even to prospective clients.
In truth, there was only one other kennel we felt remotely comfortable referring our people to. If our go-to kennel was full, we had a list of two or three others we felt our people’s dogs would be okay going to in a pinch.
Then there were a couple that, if asked directly, we would urge the inquirer to do anything other than take their dog there. Guess which one topped that last list?
We knew dogs had actually died at the Temple of Doom, and not from unfortunate sudden illnesses like bloat. That kennel had been sued for negligence in at least one case we were aware of. The plaintiff’s dog somehow got injured and suffered a massive infection with the kennel doing nothing. They didn’t contact the owner, the owner’s emergency contact person or seek veterinary assistance. The fact that there was a dog dying from a large smelly, oozing infection apparently went unnoticed for three days.
We also knew of several dogs that had escaped and run away from that kennel, never to be seen again. One of our clients said she used to use that kennel, but three times in a row her dog came home sick. The last time she went to pick up her dog, another dog was racing down the road form the kennel, with several people in hot pursuit. That had finally finished it for her.
We said nothing to Veronica. At this late date, it was not surprising that all of the kennels we would have referred her to were full. This was a short notice trip, her mother and father couldn’t take Doug because he would chase their cat and kill her if he got the opportunity. They really had very limited options for Doug’s care. And it was just for a few days; hopefully too short a time for anything too bad to happen.
We assured each other that for those four days, Doug would be okay.
Saturday evening of the long weekend finally arrived. We had something like 35 dogs, and they were camped out everywhere in the kennel. We were doing walks in high heat and humidity. We had dealt with multiple overlapping arrivals and departures and all the extra cleaning and other work that entailed. We were closed for pick up and drop off on the Saturday and Sunday. We were congratulating each other on having won through to a period of stability in the boarder population at least, when the phone rang.
We let the machine get it, as we couldn’t imagine that it could be anything very urgent, since we were fully booked. We listened to the resulting message in a good deal of confusion.
It was Veronica. She had had a phone call from her mother, who was the emergency contact for Doug.
The Temple of Doom had called Mom and told her that someone had to come and get Doug or he would be dead before the weekend was over. He’d been there about 36 hours at that point.
When we called her back, Veronica was sobbing. In vain, we tried to clarify what the problem was. We asked why, if he was ill, he hadn’t been taken to the vet. Was this what we were being asked to do?
Veronica didn’t know. Her mother was at a loss to explain what the particular crisis was with Doug. She had inquired about Doug’s situation and The Temple High Priest of Evil was rather shoulder shrug-y about the particulars.
“Hey, I’m a busy minion of evil. Places to go, dogs to torture.”
What could we do? An hysterical client who had been with us for years, and who we thought the world of, and a dog in crisis who we loved too. We called the Temple and told them we were on our way. We left the boarders in a state of confusion since we decide to delay our nighttime ‘saying goodnight’ ritual until we came back with Doug.
On the trip out, we speculated endlessly on this bizarre situation. If Doug was ill, why weren’t they calling the vet instead of Veronica’s mother? Or at least, telling Veronica’s mother to pick Doug up and take him to the vet? If Doug was ill, what was the nature of the crisis? If he wasn’t ill in some way that a visit to the vet would help, what was the cause of his supposedly imminent demise?
We arrived at the Temple to find it closed and dark. We then caught sight of the owner walking up the driveway with Doug on a lead.
This was a normally athletic dog who was bright, alert and interested in everything.
Now, he was moving like he was a hundred years old. He didn’t recognize us, even when we spoke to him. He just stood there, shivering and panting, with a completely vacant look in his eyes.
He was also almost soaking wet in places. I asked if they had had to bath him because he vomited.
Temple of Doom owner: “No, he’s just been drooling a lot.”
Us: “??!!***????”
When we could close our mouths, we asked if he was ill, and if not, what the specific problem was.
The owner nonchalantly and confidently assured us that Doug was not sick, although he allowed as how he had thrown up once the day before. This was just ‘stress’ from being in the kennel.
He went on to enlighten us from his position of vast experience and superiority that this was not at all unusual; he’d seen it many times before, especially with high strung breeds like Siberians.
It may be that when he delivered these explanations, he was unaware that we ran a kennel ourselves, and thought we were just friends or neighbours roped in to pick the dog up. But I’m pretty sure he did know who were were. No doubt he thought that we considered ourselves to be superior to him what with our fancy ‘pet resort’ and all. No doubt he was trying to give us our comeuppance and teach us a lesson about the ‘realities’ of the dog kennel business.
If we had had even one dog end up looking like this, we would have closed our business down and turned ourselves in to Animal Control.
We didn’t argue or chastise him. We just grabbed Doug’s lead and fled towards the car as fast as we could persuade Doug to stumble along.
We quickly decided that I would drive and John would get into the back seat so he could hold Doug in his arms and try to soothe him. Doug didn’t respond to an invitation to get in the car. Usually he adored car rides. John had to lift him in.
The big question was, what should we do next? Specifically, ought we to take him to the after hours vet?
Was he bloating? He certainly had the fixed stare and ‘checked out’ demeanour of a dog with GDP. But if he had been like this for many hours or even, apparently days, the chances of him still being alive if he had bloated were almost nonexistent. Besides, the fact that he had vomited argued against bloat.
There were no other indications of illness. Just the trembling and the glassy eyed stare. The lights were on but no one was home.
It was a long weekend. If we took him to the vet, he would be put into a cage and left unattended for long periods. If this was the ‘kennel stress’ reaction of which we had heard, but never experienced with the dogs at the pet resort, then leaving him at the vet’s would just stress him out all the more.
We decided against it.
The next issue was, what would we do with him? On the one hand, if he was at the house, we could keep a closer eye on him overnight. One the other hand, he was a cat chaser and we had ten cats in our house at that time.
Only eight in that photo. Trying to get all ten together for a photo shoot was like, well, herding cats.
Doug had never been in our house. Would it be more stressful for him to be at the house, locked in a spare room for the cats’ safety? Or would he be happier going to the kennel which he knew very well and which he would hopefully recognize as a safe place to be? The kennel was full to bursting.
We were running out of hands. We decided the kennel was the best option. We then ran through the list of dogs to determine who could safely share the playroom with the dog that was already camping out there. We settled on a calm older fellow who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Doug seemed to recognize the turn into the kennel. He picked up his head and then actually jumped out of the car on his own when we stopped. The General took him for a walk to try to further centre him while I dealt with the rearrangements and cleaning of rooms necessary to make a room available for Doug.
The General came back and reported that about two minutes into the walk, Doug had started showing interest in his surroundings, sniffing and lifting his leg and even pulling on the lead a bit. We took him back to his room. He trotted in quite happily.
The General and I then went about our nighttime routine, visiting with each dog separately. When I got to Doug, he had gotten up on his bed. I sat with him and petted him for a while. Finally he heaved a huge sigh and closed his eyes. We stuck around a while longer, but Doug had fallen asleep almost at once.
We returned home and called an anxious Veronica. She cried some more while she thanked us repeatedly.
While Doug seemed to be sleeping the normal sleep of the exhausted, we found it hard to sleep at all that night. Had we made the right call in not taking Doug to the vet? What if we arrived in the morning to find him sick, or even dead? Nightmares attacked me every time I dropped off.
Next morning we rushed straight to Doug’s room as soon as we arrived at the kennel. There he was, standing at his door, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, greeting us with a soft “woo woo” song.
We never did know exactly what went on at The Temple of Doom. It was a huge kennel with hundreds of dogs. I suspect Doug was just made more or less catatonic by the noise and chaos. He had just shut down.
This wasn’t the last time Doug involved us in epic drama. He did actually bloat at a later date. Those Siberians. Never a dull moment.