So what happens when you take two business professionals who decide to shake up their life and do something new and buy a struggling new Doggy Daycare? We ended up wondering why we ever did it from the first morning, up to our elbows in puppy poo, no place for washing her off and wishing we were back in our clean offices filled with computers and calculators. Why we were so willing to pay the prior owners for a business that they were so anxious to pass on, should have been our first clue!
We survived that day and went through the next few days of chaos and bewilderment. We arrived one morning at the crack of dawn to be greeted by the security alarm that sounded like an air raid siren blaring during a World War II blitzkrieg! The dogs were howling, the kennels were a mess and yet we couldn’t find anything wrong. Once our boarders were outside enjoying themselves with our tiny staff of one, my husband, I checked with the security company who said the alarm had been going off the past few nights. We soon learned, however, they were calling the old owners, who clearly didn’t care enough to let us know, who just told them to ignore it.
Eventually, a technician arrived, checked around the entire building and tried different sensitivity settings for both the motion detectors and the glass breakage alarms. Suddenly, in a Aha! moment, we all concluded that the cause of our late night disturbance was a young female Doberman named Shasta. While it was evident from the beginning that she suffered from such severe separation anxiety in the kennel at night that she would howl to the moon, reaching out to anyone or anything that would save her from this horrible experience. Her voice was so shrill and of such a decibel level that she set off the window glass breakage alarms. Think of a singer with a voice so powerful that they can shatter a glass.
We made her kennel as comfortable as home, filling it with a bed and many blankets and gave her some homeopathic calming drops in her water called Rescue Remedy. And we made sure the security company knew who to call, us green people who were already loving this business…puppy poo and all.
Dog Tales 