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.
We got our local grocery store to prepare a big slab cake with the Oak Meadows logo on the icing. We rented a coffee urn. We speculated endlessly as to how many people would show up.
Open House day arrived and we were mobbed. It seemed to be a success. Cake was eaten, coffee was drunk. Tours were given. Some vets came to check us out. Many bookings resulted, but most of them were for the summer. At that very moment in early June, business was still almost non-existent.
One night, lying in my sleepless bed, searching my mind for any possible initiative that would have the faintest hope of bringing in clients, I had a flash of inspiration. I would approach the media.
My mother’s voice in my head immediately exclaimed, “Who do you think you are?!” The idea that we would be media worthy went totally against my ingrained aversion to self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, which had been beaten into me as a kid. Never accept a compliment, never think well of yourself, never put yourself forward, or for that matter, even acknowledge your own accomplishments. The fact that I was contemplating doing what I was, showed the level of my desperation.
The next morning I shared my idea with John. He was enthused. I took my courage in my hands and called every newspaper I knew of in the area, including the Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa’s major daily. I asked for the Features Editor and tried to sell them on doing a story on us. My reasoning was, what was the worst that could happen? They couldn’t arrest me for trying.
I figured I would get snooty, derisive laughter from the Citizen and the other city papers, but perhaps, just maybe, the paper in the local towns might come out and do a little piece. After all, the fact we had given up law for a life wrangling dogs had to have a some degree of human interest, didn’t it?
I was staggered to be met with immediate enthusiastic expressions of interest not only from almost all the little local weekly papers, but from the person I spoke to at the Citizen as well. In fact, in the end, the only paper that didn’t send someone out to do a story? The local paper in the nearest town. We were truly prophets without honour in our own country.
At least half a dozen reporters visited us that week. Stories appeared in all their papers. We were actually on the front page of the Lifestyles Section in the Ottawa Citizen, complete with pictures. But the best was yet to come.
One day shortly after the story in the Ottawa Citizen ran, I took a call while I was at the house and John was in the kennel with a visitor. It was a reporter whose name I recognized from the most prominent of our Ottawa TV stations, an affiliate of a national network. She had seen the story in the Citizen and wanted to do a feature on us for the nightly news that very evening. Could they come in an hour?
It had literally never occurred to me to call the television stations in the area. I just humbly took for granted that we wouldn’t warrant that level of attention. Just goes to show that (a) conditioning is powerful and (b) you should never think small.
As soon as I got off the phone, I raced over to the kennel and burst in on John and his startled visitor yelling “Red Alert!! Red Alert! CJOH is coming over right away to film us for tonight’s news!!” After giving the bum’s rush to the visitor, we raced around cleaning up as fast as we could, all the while nervously debating what we should wear for this auspicious event.
The reporter and her camera guy duly arrived. They filmed various segments with dogs running around in the playroom, eating biscuits, playing outside, being walked and splashing through the wading pools we had set up.
We sat on a couch with dogs in our laps and talked about where we had come from, why we left law, and our vision for a new sort of kennel in the Ottawa valley.
The spot appeared on the 6:00 o’clock news that night, just before the weather. The segment was introduced by Max Keeping, Ottawa’s most beloved news anchor. He had been an Ottawa institution for thirty years. After the segment, Max had a little chat about us with the almost equally beloved local weather man, J.J. Clarke. It was as if we had received the official blessing of both the Pope and the Prime Minister.
The news people continued to show up. We even had an interview for a piece on a British Columbia TV network. Just as the interest from news people was dying down, our banker called me to say that she had been approached by a reporter for Chatelaine magazine, the oldest ‘woman’s’ magazine in Canada, with a huge circulation. This person was doing a story on successful women who had walked away from status and money to try something which they hoped would be more satisfying. The reporter wondered if our banker had any dealings with women who fit that description. My name had been passed along.
Sure enough, the Chatelaine interview took place and a story followed in the next month’s edition. Something I said featured in a block quote in the article. I had tried to describe the feeling of freedom and excitement that came from refusing to follow the conventional path:
“It’s like trying to describe an orgasm to someone who’s never had one.”
It took me a while to live that one down.
The result of all this was quite staggering. The phone immediately started ringing with inquiries from prospective clients. We were famous. Okay, locally famous, but still.
We discovered in short order that fame has its down side. As a friend of mine once remarked, “It’s great to be popular, but hell to be the rage.”
That ringing phone never stopped. People showed up unannounced, night and day. Family members dropped in. Some brought friends. People from my law practice days showed up, and not just lawyers. One notorious local man who I had sued on behalf of a client in one of my more bitterly contested court cases, showed up and acted like my long lost buddy.
One afternoon after staggering back to the house, exhausted from a morning of walking, feeding, playing with dogs, cleaning, and showing an endless procession of visitors around, I finally got myself into the shower about 2:30, having taken the precaution of locking the gate at the end of our laneway and our front door.
As I towelled off, I glanced out the bathroom window. On the lawn were two adult women and a little boy. The little boy had his pants open and was peeing on our front lawn.
I threw on a robe, plodded downstairs, stuck my head out the door and coldly inquired if I could help them. They’d seen us on the news and wanted a tour.
“We’re closed”, I said through gritted teeth. “Did you happen see that the gate was locked and has a “Closed” sign on it?”
“Oh don’t worry”, they said, with the air of invited guests trying to re-assure an inexplicably negligent host. “We had no trouble climbing over that.”
I asked them to come back another time and wearily clambered back up the stairs to finish dressing.
If this little bit of celebrity generated these kinds of intrusion and demands, what must it be like to be Harry and Meghan?
Since we opened, we had been receiving letters and notes from neighbourhood teenagers looking for a job. Now that we were facing the summer with a respectable number of bookings, and in view of our exhaustion, we decided that the time was right to hire some people for dog walking and feeding.
We had a total of four teenagers work for us that first summer. One was terrific, and worked for us right up until she went to university. I don’t think Ashley ever missed a scheduled shift, and she would goodnaturedly volunteer to show up if, as frequently happened, someone else blew a shift off.
One employee was a little spacey but generally pretty good, when she showed up. The third – we’ll call her Clueless – lived down the road on a horse farm, and seemed to know about animals, but the concept of showing up for scheduled shifts was apparently alien to her. One day when Clueless didn’t show up for work I called and got her mother, who said Clueless was still in bed. Should she wake her? In a temper, I said, “Well, she’s supposed to be at work!” and hung up.
Clueless called back with a bullshit story about how she’d hurt her back and couldn’t walk. Yeah, and I guess a sore back precluded her calling us to tell us she couldn’t come to work. Then she showed up for the afternoon shift, which she wasn’t scheduled for, miraculously mobile again, and with a friend in tow. She informed us that she was ready to work now. The friend, I was advised cheerfully, thought she’d like to come and see the dogs and cats.
Bad enough to have people who were potential clients treat us as a source of free entertainment. We didn’t need it from the staff. I informed her that we didn’t need her to work then. We had needed her that morning when she was suffering from the terrible back pain. My lifted eyebrows and pointed look whizzed right past her head. I sent her and the sightseeing friend packing.
The last member of our staff that summer was the daughter of a neighbouring doctor and his wife, who John would eventually christen ‘The Duchess of Panmure’ (our county). Let’s call the employee Muffy. The Duchess showed up at our door with Muffy in tow before we had even finished unpacking. The Duchess did all the talking. We later learned this was not a good sign. If a teenager doesn’t have the initiative to come on their own, or at least speak for themselves, chances are pretty good it is mom or dad who think they should have a job, not the teenager. Ergo, if they get the chance to blow off work, they are going to do so.
The Duchess initially offered up Muffy as a babysitter. I made the mistake of saying that our children were grown, but we might be starting a dog kennel and conceivably could need help with that at some future date. Once the building started to take shape, The Duchess was relentless about calling. So we hired Muffy.
Post Muffy hiring, the Duchess was constantly calling wanting to know why her daughter wasn’t given more shifts. I would patiently explain that I had asked, nay begged Muffy to work more shifts and she always waffled and avoided answering by saying that she couldn’t give us an answer until she had checked with The Duchess. Which Muffy clearly wasn’t doing, because Lady Muffy also clearly thought walking dogs and picking up dog crap was below her station in life.
Meanwhile, when she could be persuaded to take a shift, Muffy moved at roughly the speed of a pleistocene glacier. There is a scene in “Gone With the Wind” where Prissy is sent off by Scarlett to find a doctor because “Miss Melly is having her baby!” Scarlett gets more and more impatient waiting for her to come back, only to look out the window and see Prissy dawdling along the street at a snail’s pace, running a stick idly through the fence railings, while singing “My Old Kentucky Home” in a dreamy monotone. Imagine Muffy as Prissy and me as Scarlett, and you’ve pretty much got the picture. My mother would have said that “You had to put up a post to see her move”.
Once, I saw her on her measured progression walking a couple of chow chows. She was picking daisies, dropping some onto the chows’ heads and stopping every few feet to try to wind others into a daisy chain. I’m not making this up.
However leisurely Muffy’s mode of ambulation, it nonetheless apparently exhausted her meagre store of energy. Upon finishing each and every dog walk, she would treat herself to a ten minute break on the couch in the common room.
Whoever happened to be working with her would follow suit. As John and I rushed madly about trying to get all the work done, I would have pleasant fantasies of planting the toe of my boot firmly in her perky little derriere and giving her enough liftoff to reach the moon.
The following summer, Muffy called to let us know that she wouldn’t be working for us. Her firm, but misplaced confidence that we would be making her an offer of summer employment, was amusing. She was going to work in her father’s office instead. She told us, with no sense at all of the irony, that she would be able to get more hours there.
With the exception of Ashley, they all seemed to treat it as a hobby rather than a job. I don’t know why we were so naive. Perhaps because we had worked with professionals all our adult working life, or perhaps because we each had been raised by parents who had a severely unapologetic approach to instilling a firm sense of personal responsibility and discipline in their children. I can remember being in Grade One and my mother requiring me and my sister (the senior member of our work party, being in Grade Three) to scrub the kitchen floor to earn a nickel each, so we could pedal our bikes into town and pay our nickels to participate in the school bowling league on Saturday mornings. John had a job picking potatoes when he was only eight.
It came as an unpleasant revelation to us that the people we hired, teenagers or not, did not approach this as the calling that we did. Not showing up for work without so much as a phone call to say you weren’t coming was the most unforgivable crime in our book. We’d rather have had no one than think we had someone, only to be confused, then uncertain, and finally enraged, when they didn’t show. Walking lists and job assignments would have to be re-arranged, and this meant John and I had to literally run to get everything done, especially if we had scheduled a visitor, thinking one of us could take the time to do that, since the other would have help with the dog and cat work.
In desperation, we tried out the brother of one of our dog walkers, hoping we could add him to our roster and have one more name to call before we gave up on staffing any given weekend. The first day he worked, we came into the kitchen area to see him immobilized. He had been tied up by two little dogs who had literally run circles around him with their leads. He had apparently been helpless to prevent these miniature canine masterminds from carrying out their nefarious plan. John had to spend several minutes untying him before he could go on with his attempt at dog walking.
That evening I came across the new employee kneeling on the floor in front of a dog’s door, laughing and giggling in a creepy way while he watched a pug eat a biscuit. He apparently found this hilarious. We didn’t ask him back.
Within a matter of weeks, John went from “I’m so happy to have help” to “Tell me again why don’t we fire all their asses except Ashley’s and do it ourselves?”
We had accomplished much. The kennel was fully operational. We were going to be full for the summer. We were quickly filling up for the Christmas period even. So why didn’t we put up a banner proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished”?
Back when we had been thinking about starting a pet resort, occasionally it would occur to me to wonder how we would manage a business that operated 365 days per year. While we were building, on a brutally cold or hot day or in the midst of a downpour or an ice storm, I would find myself wondering if I was seriously intending to walk dogs in circumstances such as those.
My response to myself on those uncomfortable issues had always been to table them for another time. I shuttered my mind to those realities in favour of the more immediate and more easily solved issues of construction financing and marketing. I proceeded on the basis that it would ‘be alright on the night’.
Of course we had known intellectually that we would be working seven days a week. As some famous thinker once said, “I knew it. I just didn’t realize it.” The phrase ‘seven days a week’ somehow implies that after seven days you get to rest. We had now been working twelve hours a day for something like twelve weeks without a day off, not even counting the winter months when we had been tied down with dogs and cats in the house.
We had not yet figured out the whole procedural thing. We were so determined to make sure all the dogs had a good time, that we had no routine and no set open and closed hours. We intended to have the dogs out all the time, except overnight when they would go back to their rooms to sleep. So, we reasoned, we didn’t have to have open and closed hours for drop off and pick up, or scheduled visiting times. We were there all the time, so people could come and go as they wished.
This was a horrible idea and added immeasurably to our stress. We had literally no time to ourselves and no down time. This told on our nerves. We became increasingly snappish with each other.
I can remember leaving the kennel to go to the house for lunch, but I was so tired, I ended up just going upstairs to collapse onto my bed. I lay there wracked with guilt because I wasn’t at the kennel with the dogs.
It finally dawned on us that not only was this intolerable for us, it was bad for the dogs. We should have known this from our experience with our own dogs. When they are at home, dogs don’t play all the time. They’re not even active all the time. Dogs are used to sleeping a good part of the day as well as through the night. Why should it be different when they are boarding?
In fact, we started to notice that often throughout the day, some dogs would desperately try to find some alone time. They would go and stand at the door to the dog dormitory wing, literally begging to be let back into their rooms.
We would let that dog in, and other dogs who had retired earlier back there hoping to get a nap, would wake up and start barking.
People were coming in at every hour of the day and evening. We had designed the kennel so that the playroom could be seen by clients arriving at the front door. From the front foyer there was a half wall pass-through looking into the playroom. Clients would enter, come up to the half wall, and talk to us. This way the clients could enjoy the sight of dogs frolicking in the playroom.
To prevent the dogs from jumping over the pass-through into the foyer and running out the front door every time it opened, the plan had been to put in sliding glass panels that could be closed. Of course, we hadn’t gotten around to having the glass panels installed, so with distressing regularity, people would come in and some adventurous hound would jump over.
Even if no dog made the jump to the foyer, every time someone new would arrive, pandemonium would break out among the dogs in the playroom who would bark, leap and jostle each other to get near the newcomer. This in turn would raise the aggression level in other dogs.
We had also learned the hard way that some people have a terrible habit of leaving doors open behind them, making us even more paranoid about the risk of dogs escaping as people came and went at their own chosen times. We tried to have at least two doors between the dogs and the great outdoors. Mostly it worked.
But one day, when I came in from the backyards with the dogs who had been playing there intending to let them back into their rooms, I found a strange woman in the kitchen area. She had obviously come in the front door, and not seeing anyone in the reception area, decided to ignore the clearly marked sign inviting her to press the buzzer for service. Why, that would require her to wait for us to arrive. Instead, because apparently none of the rules applied to her, she’d just pushed through two more doors to find her way into the back, no doubt hoping for a surreptitious look around. I realized to my horror that she had left both of those doors open, which meant that all the dogs who were streaming in the door with me were now streaming right by me and through the interview room out to the front foyer.
All it would have taken to release the curious and energetic pack into the wild was for someone to open the front door at that moment. She seemed oblivious and if anything, quite affronted when I yelled at her as I ran after the escaping canine horde.
The interests of sanity in both ourselves and the dogs required that we set some limits for the dogs, for the clients and for ourselves. We decided that we would institute open and closed hours for drop off and pick up. We would open between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m., again between 4:00 and 5:30 p.m. and finally between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. When we were open, the dogs would be out and active, but when it came time to close, everyone would go back to his or her room. Each dog would get a biscuit after we had done our beddie-bye routine and that would be the signal that quiet and calm were going to descend on Oak Meadows.
Once the dogs were away, either for overnight or for their mid-day nap, the cats could come out of the cat room and have their turn at free run of the playroom.
The result fascinated us. When we arrived in the morning or at any other time when the dogs were scheduled for walks and playtimes, the barking was deafening. They quickly understood that our arrival meant fun times were about to happen. But at the end of the activity periods, the distribution of biscuits became a signal and they settled down to quiet almost immediately.
At beddie-bye time, when one of us took each wing and arrived to visit with each dog separately in their rooms, you would imagine they would all be barking in anticipation of their turns. Nope. It would usually be dead quiet as we went from room to room, patting them, giving belly rubs and whispering to them.
Occasionally a dog on his first visit, not knowing what was occurring, would bark when we entered. But pack behaviour is a wonderful thing. It typically only took a few seconds for the newcomer to realize no one was joining him in the song of his people, whereupon he would be come embarrassed and desist.
I will admit to enticing a dog to sing now and then. I could get the samoyeds, the huskies and especially the hounds going if I started woo wooing to them in a low voice, or sometimes even howl. There was one redbone hound called Whipper (isn’t that a fabulous name for a lean hound dog?) who never failed to crack me up. He’d give me the side-eye when I started, then a sort of whimper as he resisted at first, but finally throw his head back and howl in utter abandon.
We decided that visits would be by appointment only, and take place only during our open hours. That way, the dogs would not be disturbed with strangers coming into their dormitories after they went beddie-bye. Clients would not be allowed beyond the foyer and interview room, except when they had their tour. No more ‘settling my dog in her room’. No more prolonged, sad good-byes that only contributed to the dogs’ anxiety.
Dogs would be taken out for a walk as soon as they arrived. This was a much more positive introduction to kennel life than being wrestled into a room by their owner. In the beginning, when we had allowed that, sometimes when we returned to take the dog for a walk after seeing the owner off the premises, we would be met by raised hackles and growling:
“My owner left me here. She clearly wants me to guard this space until she returns. I don’t know who you are, but move along or take the consequences lady.”
Being handed over to us by their owner inspired the dog to trust that it was okay to be with us. It disposed them in our favour. We showed up, a good time followed. Most of all, it meant that when we returned to the kennel with the dog, their focus had shifted away from the owner, to the smells and sights on the walk.
All in all a much, much happier introduction to kennel life. Happy dogs were less stressed dogs. Less stressed dogs were less noisy dogs, less fearful dogs and less aggressive dogs. Aside from the fact that we wanted our dogs to be happy, happier dogs are so much easier to handle.
The boarders would be on a routine, we’d all be less stressed and Heather and John would get some downtime too.
To make sure everyone understood our new rules, we started to spend a lot of time with each new client or prospective client, explaining our operation, our rules, and the reasons for those rules. We used our boarding agreement as an ideal way to cover all possible scenarios, so that people would know in advance what to expect.
In the beginning, we didn’t even have a boarding agreement, which might seem odd, given that we were both lawyers.
That changed the first time we had to take a dog to the vet. Unsurprisingly, this honour went to Spike, the Jack Russell terrier I mentioned earlier, who at unpredictable intervals tried to attack everybody and everything that came within range. Finally the inevitable happened. One of his victims fought back before we could intervene and Spike got himself a nip that broke the skin. We took him to the vet.
As we paid the bill, it occurred to us to wonder whether we could or should ask the client to pay it. After all, Spike was the aggressor. In the end, we discussed it with the client, and agreed to her proposal that we split the bill.
But the incident made us realize that we should have a contract, if for no other reason than that it would provide an opportunity to sit with our clients and turn our collective attention to a number of issues that could possibly arise. That way we could ensure that most contingencies had been covered and there would be no surprises or disputes in the event something bad happened.
Our new policy was that the client would be responsible for any veterinary costs, regardless of the circumstances. Privately, we retained the right to pay the bill ourselves, if we felt that was the right thing to do. In fact, on the rare occasions when veterinary help was needed, we quite often did pay the vet bill, because it was part of maintaining a good relationship with loyal clients.
One of our faithful clients had three whippets. They were delightful dogs, but with exceptionally fragile skins and bones. For this reason, they wore some sort of clothing all the time to protect them from accidental injury. Their owner told me that one dog had a rip opened up in his skin just from being brushed by the tooth of one of the others. They had no protective layer of fat under the skin, which was sort of like a taut drumskin. The lightest abrasion could puncture it. Their shirts and pyjamas protected them. In fact, one of the fun aspects of boarding them was seeing what fashion statement they made each time they came in.
My personal all time favourite was the Batman pajamas.
One day I was returning from a walk with the three whippets. I opened the back door and stood aside for the dogs to go ahead of me. Everyone having gone through, I stepped into the building and gave the door a tug to swing it shut behind me. Just at that moment, one of the whippets decided to back up. The door shut on her tail, not all that hard, and bounced back open. Had it been a more robust tail, there would have been a yelp and maybe at worst, a little scrape. This being a whippet, the result was blood and bone near the end of the tail.
I took her to our vet who did an x-ray and confirmed that the tail was broken. Amanda informed me that often with an injury of this sort with whippets, the vet simply amputated the tip of the tail. The bones there were as thin as toothpicks and setting them successfully was almost impossible. I’m sure I went white with shock. It was bad enough that the poor dog had suffered this injury. How was I to tell her lovely owner that her dog’s tail had suffered an amputation at the end?
Seeing my face, Amanda took pity on me and said she could attempt to set it, if that was what I wanted. But it would cost a lot more money. I didn’t hesitate. We would pay. It happened by accident and I didn’t feel that I had been negligent in any way.
So the new contract provided an opportunity to explain things to visitors or prospective clients.
Generally, if a dog got sick or injured, we called their own vet, as their vet had the records and could provide context and continuity. The same for cats, although in our 16 years at Oak Meadows, we only had to take one cat to the vet.
We took the approach of keeping the client’s vet in the loop on the advice of the ABKA. It was the best advice we got at that seminar. Aside from the benefits to the pets and clients, it resulted in a lot of good will from vets. They became a terrific source of referrals for us.
If it wasn’t practical to take the dog or cat to their own vet, we had our own vet in Almonte, five minutes away. If we took an animal to the vet, we paid the bill ourselves and got reimbursement from our clients. The vets also loved that system. We allowed the clients to place a limit on the amount of money we were authorised to spend on their behalf, if we couldn’t contact them before treatment was necessary.
When a client was undecided about whether or not to set a spending limit, we always used the example of bloat to illustrate the absolutely worst possible case scenario. If a dog was bloating, it would be a life and death situation, with time being of the essence. They can die in less than an hour. We would pick up the dog and race to the nearest vet. If we got the dog to a vet in time, then a decision would have to be made whether or not to operate. The procedure cost thousands and the long term prognosis is not good.
At this point in the discussion about spending limits, I had one visitor pick up her dog, run from the kennel, jump in her car and drive away.
We soon learned that it didn’t matter how much you explained your rules or laid stress on your inflexibility when it came to altering them, there would always be people who seemed to have been born convinced that rules are for other people. If I had a dollar (even a Canadian dollar) for every time someone arrived late, stating some variation of “It’s just me; it’s just this once; I’m only a few minutes late”, I’d be a rich woman.
Later that summer, people who were friends of another client made a first booking for their dog. The friends’ dog Molly would be staying with us at the same time the new people wanted to board their dog. They came for a tour, at which time they told us that their dog was afraid of unknown dogs. As always, we explained our process for introducing a new dog to the other boarders. The arriving dog would say goodbye to her owners at the door and be taken out for a walk.
When she came back, her owners would be gone, but her attention would not be focused on their departure because she would be distracted by the walk. Then we would take the fearful dog to a safe setting, to slowly introduce her to one or two other dogs who we knew well and trusted not to be intimidating or dominating.
As soon as the new clients arrived to drop their dog off for the booking, they announced they wanted to see Molly so their dog would know she had a friend in residence.
In theory getting Molly to meet this dog this was a fine idea. Pragmatically though, it wasn’t going to happen.
Molly was outside, playing. Molly was a big time player. I figured the chances of her voluntarily coming inside with me for purposes unknown to Molly would land somewhere between nil and zero. There were also tons of dogs running around free everywhere, including the common room and the back hall. To get the new dog to where Molly was, would require that dog to navigate through this pack of dogs, who would all be excited to meet and greet the newcomer.
I pointed out these difficulties. I also reminded them that when they visited, we had explained what the intake process would be. Moreover, the importance of not overwhelming a newly arrived dog to the point where she would be scared or perhaps even show fear aggression, was all the more important with a dog like theirs. Throwing her willy-nilly into the large excited group between us and Molly would be particularly disastrous for a dog who was afraid of other dogs. This was not the way to begin her experience of kennel life.
They were very insistent. It was a very busy morning. Eventually, in an effort to just get the admission process moving along, I figured it would be faster to go and see if I could drag Molly in. That was a big negatory. Molly was having a great game with another dog and had no interest in coming when called.
For my part, I had no intention of forcing her. Molly’s boarding fee included generous playtime. It didn’t include having that playtime interrupted and cut short to perform meet-and-greet duties as if she was an Oak Meadows employee.
When I returned, John had inserted himself into the process. He had gotten a lead on the new dog to take her for a walk. When I came back in from my unsuccessful attempt at dognapping Molly, the clients were in a heated argument with John. Their current demand was not only that they be allowed to wade through all the other dogs who were out and about so they could personally take their dog back to the kennel area to meet Molly, but also, if you please, to then take her to her room and show her how to go in and out of the dog door that allowed access to the private outdoor run.
I pointed out that if they were standing on the other side of the dog door, there was no way their dog was going to leave them and go through it to the dog run anyway. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. Furthermore, there was the issue of having to confine every other dog who was out playing, so that their shy dog could pass through to the back unmolested.
The longer this argument went on, the more signs of stress their dog was showing. She clearly knew something was up. Finally John simply said, “That’s not how we do things.” Then he nipped the leash out of the owner’s hand, made encouraging noises to the dog, and they left for the walk, with the dog showing no reluctance.
The clients then turned their ire on me. They were not at all happy with the way they had been treated. I was informed that we had no client relation skills. They were certainly not going to give their business to horrible people like us. They wanted their dog back so they could leave.
I went out and yelled at John, who wasn’t too far down the walking path, to come back with the dog. As he was returning, the male half of this precious pair informed me that “Your husband is an asshole.” At which point I told them them it was a good thing they had already volunteered to leave because otherwise, we would have thrown them out.
As they departed down the driveway, the brake lights came on and they stopped. I could almost hear the conversation taking place as their massive intellects began to grapple with the fact that they had just blown off a boarding reservation for their dog at the height of the summer, and they had virtually no chance of finding anywhere else to board her at that late date.
Years later, the female member of this entitled pair called for a reservation, making no reference to our earlier history together. Whether she had simply forgotten who we were, whether they had tried every other kennel in town and found them even more unsatisfactory than ours, whether they had been thrown out of other kennels for similar behaviour, or whether she hoped we wouldn’t remember them, I don’t know. We declined the boarding without comment.
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