As a building started to emerge amid the constant blizzards, we started considering how to market our new and improved approach to cat and dog boarding facilities.
I knew from my experience putting a Champion title on my beloved Toby that the Ottawa Kennel Club had a dog show in November.
I suggested we should take a table there in the area reserved for people selling and marketing dog-related stuff, and advertise our idea. We could give away promotional coupons at the dog show, offering one night’s free boarding. John was enthusiastic. He decided to put his train model making talent to use and build a scale model of our building so people could see what we had in mind. Our design firm came up with some huge foamboard signs with our logo and generic pictures of people cuddling animals.
The ABKA had been big on retail sales. In the early autumn we had attended a ‘Pet Services’ marketing event in Toronto, where various vendors offered wholesale merchandise. We had bought a number of items. We decided to use the dog show as an opportunity to test our acumen at judging the pet related giftware market. We would offer our scented “pet odour” candles, dog beds, cutesy stationery and other paraphernalia, as well as my homemade dog biscuits, packaged with labels showing the Oak Meadows logo and titled ‘Bone Appetit’. John was sure the candles would be a big hit, while I privately thought they’d be a drug on the market, but my dog biscuits would fly off the table. In the end, we were both disappointed.
A lot of people stopped by our table, but our sales were negligible. Worse, the future would show we generated almost no boarding business from all our hard work. In fact, the free boarding idea turned out to be a fiasco. Despite our dual lawyer superpowers, we had forgotten to put any limitations on the coupon. Duh. As my mother used to say to me and my siblings when we had done something she considered more than normally boneheaded, “And these are the bright ones!”
I did at least renew my acquaintance with Toby’s breeder at the dog show. ”
When I told her what we were doing, she looked at me for a minute, then shook her head and said: “You people just live, don’t you?
One of the obvious things to do to promote the kennel in this pre-Google era was to advertise in the Yellow Pages. Our wonderful design consultants prepared a great ad, different from any other in the Yellow Pages. Classy and informative, it talked about the mission of our kennel, and how we intended to focus on not just the physical well being of people’s pets, but on their emotional needs as well. The only wrinkle was that the next Ottawa Yellow Pages directory would come out in January of 1999, when Oak Meadows would be nothing more than a concrete pad and some framing.
We discussed putting in a big banner across the ad, declaring we would not be open until the spring of 1999. In the end, we went ahead without the disclaimer. Our thought was that we wanted people to call even if we weren’t open for business, so we would at least have the chance to talk to them about our plans and our philosophy. While we couldn’t accommodate a booking that winter, they might be interested enough to call back for the summer. We placed the same ad in a couple of local phone directories as well, though they were being published even earlier than the Ottawa book.
Almost the instant one of the local directories was delivered in December, someone saw our ad and left a message on our newly installed Oak Meadows phone system. They had a young black Lab-type dog called Kelsey. Could we board her over Christmas? I shot out to the garage where John was engaged in one of his endless discussions with the contractor. After I broke the big news, we looked at each other for a minute and said almost simultaneously, “Why couldn’t we keep her in the house?”
I went back and called our hot prospect, explained our situation and made the offer. She was delighted to accept. Our first booking!!! We were both thrilled and alarmed.
The great day duly arrived and our first client drove up with Kelsey, who proved to be a pretty, lively and well behaved house guest. At the end of the stay, we collected our first fee with great excitement, but felt a surprising degree of sadness when Kelsey was driven away. We had become attached.
This was the first of many such adventures in boarding dogs and cats in the house as the winter went on and the kennel slowly progressed. The phone was ringing with gratifying regularity. We started taking one dog at a time into the house. Then, emboldened by our success, we tried two, and then three. We had two dogs of our own still living with us at this point, as well as four cats.
We encountered a number of different breeds of both dogs and eccentric owners. I met my first beagle up close and personal and fell in love.
I had heard that beagles were obstinate, loud and difficult to train. Those things are true to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the particular dog. We had beagles were very quiet, for example. But I found them all delightful. There is something about their absolutely serious focus on absolutely silly things, that is irresistible.
This little girl (let’s call her “Shiloh”) was supposed to be trained to pee and poop in a “litter box” – actually just a big wooden box filled with wood shavings. Shiloh did not seem to have read the memo on this procedure, as she peed with great abandon all over our house. I forgave her these transgressions however, because she made me laugh.
I would be sitting at the table having lunch. Shiloh would insist on trying to get into my lap. She would be repeatedly repulsed. She finally resorted to scoping out alternative methods of getting her way, quickly settling on jumping into John’s vacant chair opposite me. She would then proceed with part two of her plan for kitchen domination, fixing me with an unnerving, unwavering stare, visibly willing me to hand over the sandwich. I would pretty much cave in like a rotten melon.
One family of three dogs wanted to come at a point when we had already booked several dogs for the house. But three dogs – think of the fees! We took them, and lived to regret it. They chased our cats constantly and chewed our furniture. We ended up corralling them in the garage.
An otherwise charming miniature Dachshund lifted his leg and peed against every surface in the house, including the upholstered furniture.
We kept a pair of Dobermans. Individually, they were beautifully trained and well behaved. They were two of the only three dogs we ever walked off lead.
But the male was totally obsessed with the female. He stalked her around the house and licked her constantly any time he managed to get close to her. They had to be watched around other dogs because the male would get jealous of any attentions paid to the object of his obsession. So I would sit in the kitchen, all doors closed to keep the boarding dogs away from our cats, constantly telling the male Doberman to get away from the female, while also ensuring that the two other dogs who were staying with us didn’t go near the female, thus inciting the male’s jealously, all while the female was trying to sit in my lap, thus enticing all the other dogs to want to sit in my lap.
I was living in a Marx Brothers movie.
We began to fully appreciate that a reasonably small behaviour problem in one dog, augmented by different behavioural ticks in three or four other dogs who were all in our house at the same time had a chaotic effect greater than the sum of its parts. It did not facilitate a peaceful and zen-like existence.
We had dogs that scratched down the door if confined to one room, dogs that chewed on everything including toys belonging to other boarders, dogs that would snap at other dogs if fed together, and one dog that successfully locked us out of our own house.
This latter was our introduction to the sad fact that, shockingly, clients are not necessarily frank in what they tell you about themselves and about their dogs.
One day a young man called to inquire about leaving a yellow Labrador retriever with us. He wanted to take his girlfriend away for a weekend, but she would not leave her dog in a regular kennel. He hoped, from reading our ad in the Yellow Pages, that we could offer some alternative to cage boarding. I explained our situation, advised him that we were keeping dogs in the house, but unfortunately, we already had our quota for the weekend he was interested in.
He pleaded with me, drawing a lovely picture of the many delights in store for us if we took this wonderful dog. In the interests of encouraging young love and unable to resist the seductive attributes of the dog being described by my caller, I agreed to take the booking.
Let’s call the Lab “Wilbur”. It turned out, that like those ads for x-ray glasses in old comic books, Wilbur did not function exactly as described in the advertising. Actually, not even a little bit. He resembled the well-mannered, intelligent, saint-like dog his owner had described about as much as Lassie resembles an orangutan in a ’roid rage. Wilbur was next thing to feral. His preferred method of locomotion was to propel himself around in a frenetic series of mighty leaps. Such feeble barriers as furniture, people or other dogs meant nothing to Wilbur when he was intent on one of his whirlwind tours around the house.
He barked constantly, making weird honking noises that sounded like a bicycle horn on meth. He was incredibly strong. I would defy any champion of the World Wrestling Federation to get the better of Wilbur in a no holds barred cage match. He ate anything animal, vegetable or mineral he could get his teeth into which, given his leaping prowess, meant anything left within a height of eight feet above floor level. We later found out that he had eaten the couch in the girlfriend’s apartment.
For some reason, they chose not to share this salient fact in advance.
While Wilbur was with us, we went outside one day to bid adieu to a departing client whose dog had somehow miraculously survived several days in Wilbur’s company with her sanity intact. When we came to get back into the house, the door was locked. All that could be seen through the window in the top half of the door was Wilbur’s massive head, bobbing and weaving frantically as he leaped up and down on the other side of the door, spraying great ropes of saliva everywhere. All that could be heard were Wilbur’s honked, hysterical queries, at ear bursting volume: “Whatcha doing out there??? Why don’t you come in??? Why can’t I get out there where you are???”
John finally managed to effect entry to the house by dismantling a previously boarded up cellar window and then crawling through the accumulated centuries of dust and spider webs to risk a broken leg dropping onto the cellar floor. We shall draw a curtain of discreet silence over his observations on Wilbur’s parentage (and his owners’) and their likely destination after death.
Wilbur continued to board with us for a few years after the kennel was completed, and he did settle down a trifle when put on the doggy equivalent of Ritalin. Incredible though it seems, in the classic triumph of hope over experience, this young couple eventually acquired a second dog. This time they chose a Dalmatian, Wilbur presumably having disillusioned them about the claims made for the trainability of the Labrador retriever breed. Dalmatians are not exactly known for being couch potatoes. But not even a Dalmatian could match Wilbur’s energy levels.
The Dalmatian’s habitual expression when confronted with the living tornado that was Wilbur, was one of stunned incredulity, as though wondering what lunatic asylum he had wandered into. He’d look at Wilbur doing one of his Flying Wallenda impressions, and then at us as if to say “Are you seeing this?” For although the doggy Ritalin may have helped Wilbur’s eccentricities a trifle, if you had not known him pre-Ritalin, you could have been forgiven for thinking he belonged in a strait jacket.
We also boarded a few cats in the house. Those, we kept in the spare bedrooms, and on the whole they were much quieter and more well behaved than the dogs.
The notable exception was the first cat we boarded. She had a thyroid condition and had to be given a pill each day. We were assured by her owner that she would take the pills in treats. This occurred at a point in January when I was suffering from a horrible flu and head cold. Came time to pill the cat and John wasn’t in the house. In my fever delirium, I decided to administer the pill without waiting for reinforcements. Pill goes in treat, treat goes in cat. I may have been doped up on antihistamines, but what could possible go wrong?
I still have the scars.
As January turned to February, I nursed my cold and my mangled hand, and fielded phone calls, many of them from people inquiring about boarding dogs for March Break. We knew this would be a peak boarding time, and that if we could maximize the number of dogs and cats we took, we would collect some substantial fees.
We were getting really stressed having dogs and cats in the house all the time. Not only were they sometimes noisy and destructive, but there was no respite from them or from their owners. We were now at the point where we might have two or three cats in the upstairs spare rooms, as well as two or three dogs corralled in the kitchen, with another shut into a different part of the house or the garage. It was hard to leave the house even to run an errand, because many of these dogs could not be trusted in the house alone.
Every time someone wanted to board their pet, they would come to the house to talk to us about it. They would then want to be conducted on a tour through the house, ostensibly to see if it was “suitable for their pet”. Mostly they were burning with curiosity to explore every nook and cranny of our intriguing old stone house.
Sometimes it seemed, they would stay forever. One young woman who was supposedly interested in boarding, came with her dog, stayed for an hour, and then announced she wanted to come back with her boyfriend so he could see the house too. No boarding resulted. Every time someone dropped off or picked up a dog or cat, they came into the house, and as often as not, settled in for a nice long chat.
There were no boundaries and no privacy. We were people who valued both highly. About the time I had the flu in January, we had our first no-show for a boarding appointment. We were actually relieved.
We began to fixate on getting our boarding business out of our house and into our kennel.
In the work schedule that had been provided by our contractor, the kennel was supposed to be finished by April 1st. It had been an unusually hard winter. That February there was a record snow storm that resulted in not just the county road, but the highways around us actually being closed for the first time in memory. Drifts were up to the roof of the barn.
That shut down work for several days. Aside from anything else, the crew could not get to the work site because the roads were closed. At other times it was bitterly cold, to the point that the men couldn’t work outside.
I knew I should make allowances for that. But the construction phase of the kennel seemed to be frustratingly slow, even without blizzard conditions. Some days, one guy would show up to work.
However much I appreciated the difficulties the workers were labouring under, I was still obstinately attached to the April 1st completion date. If the kennel was going to be even close to being completely finished by that date I reasoned, then it should be well along by mid-March. Could one of the two dog wings be finished in its entirety by mid-March, so that we could board dogs in the kennel then, leaving the other wing to be completed through the rest of the month? Or could both wings be finished and the common areas left to the end?
I tackled our contractor, who was not enthusiastic about my proposals. Admittedly, yes, okay, he had logic on his side. He explained that the trades would come in waves – plumbing, then electrical, then drywallers, floor installers, painters and so on. To have them do just one part of the kennel and then come back would be inefficient, costly and might well delay the ultimate completion date substantially.
Undeterred, I persisted. What point would we get to by say, the beginning of March? Would there be heat? Lights? Water? John and I discussed how ‘finished’ the kennel would have to be in order to reasonably house dogs in it. At some point, and that right soon, we would have to make a decision. If we decided to proceed on the basis that we would be able to board dogs in the kennel by March Break, whatever shape the building was in, then we could accept bookings from at least a dozen dogs. If we held off and waited until the building was fully completed, then we couldn’t commit ourselves to boarding any more than the minimum number of dogs and cats we could keep in the house.
If you have stayed with me this far, you can guess what we decided. Balls to the wall and damn the consequences. We were going to be in the kennel by early March, even if we had to light fires in the aisles to keep warm.
The first of March came and went. With March Break fast approaching and thirteen dogs booked into eleven rooms for that week, we still had heat in only part of the kennel, no lights in the dog wings and no running water at all.
Nevertheless, on Friday March 5, 1999 we took another big step. Two dogs that had been staying in the house, a border collie and an ancient Lhasa apso, had the honour of becoming the first dogs to stay overnight in the kennel. I can still recall our little procession walking them over on leads, carrying their beds with us. We both felt really odd about leaving them there. How would they cope with being alone? How we would we cope being a hundred yards away from them? How would we all cope with the unfinished kennel, and construction going on all around our new dog boarding operation?
Dealing with the emotional content was only one issue. To this point we had concentrated almost exclusively on the plethora of decisions that had to be made every day about the kennel construction. Now that we actually had dogs in the kennel, we realised that the issues involved with the physical building were actually the most straightforward to grapple with.
Aside from some pretty vague daydreams, we had not given a lot of thought to how the day to day operations of the kennel would work. Sure, we had a general philosophical approach: lots of people time, lots of play time, as quiet and stress free an environment as possible. But how would that translate to reality? Now that operations had moved to the kennel, what would we actually do with the dogs? When would we do it and how?
Historian Robert Service says in his book ‘Comrades’: “The Bolsheviks came to power without a detailed template for the new state order. They did their inventing almost as an afterthought.”
Yup, us and the Bolsheviks. Revolution is easy. State building is hard.
The first procedure we implemented occurred without any planning on our part at all. That night, after we entered the kennel with the first two dogs to take up residence and placed them in their rooms, we looked at each other, nonplussed.
“What now?” John asked. I had nothing.
“I guess we should go into their rooms with them and say good night,” he offered.
This seemed like a fine idea to me, so he took the border collie and I took the geriatric Lhasa. We placed their own beds over the steel framed but cushiony beds we had invested in. Each of us knelt on the floor beside our dog on his bed, patted him, crooned to him, told him his name and how many days he had left to go.
Then we gave them each a (homemade) biscuit, turned out the lights and left, not without a great deal of trepidation.
This procedure of saying goodnight to the dogs carried on once the kennel was fully operational. Each of us would take one wing of the kennel and go into each dog’s room and tuck them in before they got their homemade dog biscuits. I sometimes thought that beddie-bye routine alone was worth the price of admission. You could feel the stress level coming down as quiet descended, every dog on his or her bed, waiting patiently for his or her turn at one-on-one attention before the day finished.
The next morning we arrived with great anticipation to see how our boarders had fared during the night. The border collie had eaten the cushion off the steel framed bed we had provided, and the elderly Lhasa had peed on the other. As we wrestled the coverings off the frames to be washed, we wished we had thought the whole cushiony bed thing through a bit more thoroughly.
As the days raced by to March Break, we beavered away side by side with the construction workers, doing what we could in between walking the dogs, answering the phone, giving tours of the half finished kennel, baking dog biscuits and trying to figure out procedures; what we were going to do with our boarders.
I pitched in and washed down all the dog room walls and floors with muriatic acid preparatory to painting them. The acid scrub took three days, because there was a constant stream of visitors intrigued by our Yellow Pages ad. We would gamely show them through the half finished kennel, dodging tradesmen and on-going construction. Speaking loudly so we could be heard over the bangs and roars of the construction noise (the heating and plumbing pipes were being installed), we would describe in glowing terms our vision of how things would look and operate in the end.
Whether it was our obvious enthusiasm and commitment, or whether people were just desperate enough to try any sort of boarding experience for their dogs other than the standard fare being offered elsewhere in Ottawa, or some combination of the two, none of the visitors were put off by being marched through a construction zone.
New bookings were made for March, for Easter and even for the summer. We already had four repeat bookings from the owners of the cats and dogs who had stayed in the house.
Our fatigue was offset by the thrill of our growing success. Maybe we would prove the ABKA wrong after all. If only our finances would support that optimism.
Aside from our joint fervent desire to have our house back to ourselves, as the person in charge of the family finances, I was itching to start making some real income. Between Christmas and the beginning of March, we had banked about $4,000 in boarding income. When you consider that we were only charging something like $11 a day per dog and $8 a day per cat – not to mention the fact that we didn’t even have a freaking kennel – this was a pretty impressive indicator of our determination to succeed. However, in light of the outgo, it was laughable.
The bank loan repayments had started in November with the first advance. They alone were almost $4,000 per month. Worse, in addition to the loan payments, we were constantly being asked to shell out money for ‘extras’ in the construction.
We had hired a mechanical engineer to create a plan for a balanced heating and air conditioning system, along with an industrial sized air exchanger. For reasons that are still not clear to me, that very expensive plan was scrapped in favour of something concocted by the HVAC sub-contractor. Not only did we not get the system we had contracted for, we ended up paying a substantial “Extra” for the substitute system.
We were liquidating savings accounts at a ferocious rate. My journal note at this point is inelegant, but succinct: “We’re so far down in the shit, we’d need a periscope to see daylight.”
March Break arrived. The construction work had to go on around the visitors and the fifteen dogs now in the half finished kennel, who needed to be walked, played with, fed and watered in the primitive conditions obtaining in the building. Only one of the two dog dormitory wings had heat. We filled that wing with dogs, but also put a couple of big, heavy coated Malamutes in the unheated wing, in rooms near the open door to the heated kitchen, and hooked up heaters there with extension cords.
There were no lights except in the central kitchen area. We carted over every light we could find and snaked numerous extension cords around and about. There was no water. We lugged huge bottles of water over from the house three times a day. We appropriated the unfinished grooming room for storage of dog food.
We played with the dogs in the unfinished playroom after the construction work stopped for the day. We played ball with them up and down the aisle in the dog wing while work was going on during the day. We walked them four times a day, taking great care not to stumble into construction debris.
The worst thing was the dog walks after dark, which came about 5:30 in the evening. We would park our car at the front of the kennel with the lights on to provide some illumination for about twenty or so yards. After that, it was a question of stumbling down the lane with flashlights, into potholes and ruts in the snow pack, over drifts and icy patches, hanging onto our dogs for dear life, until we reached the illumination of the house lights. We would circle the driveway in front of the house and head back down the dark lane to the kennel.
The snow turned heavy and wet, and then we had rain followed by a freeze. The driveway was a mess. Some of our clients got stuck. Our kind neighbour Clarence was watching over us though. If he saw us in difficulties, he would trundle over in this tractor and tow the hapless client out of the ditch.
When I look back on it, I wonder what madness possessed us to think we could do this. As with so many things in our life, it simply never occurred to us to ask if it was possible. We saw a way to make it work, so we did whatever we had to do to get there.
In retrospect, I have to feel sorry for our contractor, who was bemused and bewildered by our antics. We were so focused on the difficulties of operating a kennel in the middle of a construction zone that we were oblivious to the problems this must have created for those trying to do construction in the middle of an operating dog kennel. In fact, I was impatient with anyone who had the temerity to get in my way. I remember going quite ballistic one day when I came in to find a crew mixing cement in the aisle of the wing where the dogs were staying.
At the end of March Break, despite all the difficulties, we were glad we had made the effort. From just the ten days of March Break, we had deposited as much money as we had made keeping dogs and cats in the house during the previous two and a half months. But we were still a very long way from being solvent.
In an effort to generate more income, we started offering day care. Some of the dogs we got were great, including Smith, a tiny poodle/Lhasa cross and Wesson, a big gangly German shepherd type. The first to sign up for day care though, were a whole other story. The day these two Chesapeake Bay retrievers arrived, we had a visitor. The male Chessie turned aggressive with the visitor’s dog and his owner just stood and watched. That should have been a clue that these were not good candidates for day care.
A few days later, I was attempting to play ball in the aisle with the Chessies and a couple of other dogs. The male Chessie attacked one of the other boarders, an older black Lab type. I waded in to try to separate them. The Chessie turned and savagely bit me. I had never been bitten by a dog before. It was very painful. But what really floored me was the shock, which was worse than the actual pain. My whole body felt like it was buzzing. I was light headed and thought for a moment that I would pass out. Instead I just slowly slid down the wall, cradling my mangled hand and bleeding all over the place.
One of the construction workers saw what had occurred and came to my aid. After a bit, having recovered my equilibrium, I drove myself to the hospital. The doctor said it was better not to stitch it, as dog bites carry a lot of bacteria into the wound. If it is closed up, it might easily get infected. I got a tetanus shot and returned to work.
John and I both agreed that the important thing was that the other dog had not been injured.
So of course, we told the owners to take their horrible dog elsewhere, right? Er, no. In fact, when they came to pick up their dogs I apologised to them. The hospital was required by law to report the bite to the Public Health Unit. I let the owners know that Public Health would be in touch with them about their dog having bitten someone. I said that I was so sorry and hoped they weren’t too upset.
Proving yet again that a person can be intelligent and still be an idiot.
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