30th Anniversary

This month marks the 30th anniversary of my career working with dogs. I’ve been reflecting a lot this month about the journey and my life with dogs. Looking over the last couple decades I’m reminded of all that I have learned through my work with dogs. I think the majority of our audience knows we take the dogs to a SniffSpot out in Snohomish. Sniffspot is just an app where people rent their property, and that is how I stumbled upon this opportunity. These properties are pretty special and pretty unique. I have visited quite a few properties on the app, but we have landed on these because of all that they offer. The property owners really care about the dogs and are constantly doing upkeep and improvements on the properties. This property offers solitude, woodland, fields, and water, a combination seldom found elsewhere.

We had a new dog start last week, and I videoed his first 15 minutes of being there. I wish that I had done that with all the dogs. Watching Patrick on his first day and reviewing the videos reminded me of why this switch to the SniffSpots has been so enriching. We have stuck with the SniffSpots through numerous stressors on the business because of the dogs. It's getting to see the dogs experience freedom, the freedom to explore, the freedom to sniff, the freedom to move their body the way they want to, and then over time, to watch the dogs develop relationships with other dogs, this has brought so much joy and fulfillment.  

How did we get here?

 I started working with dogs when I was in high school at a traditional kennel. That meant the dogs were kenneled in runs and I would go in on a holiday like this and there would be somewhere between 70 to 100 dogs. I would just run down the line, and I would open all the shoots so the dogs could go to the bathroom, if they hadn't already done so inside their kennels. The runs were separated into indoor/outdoor sections. They spent their whole time on cement. They're sleeping on cement or on plastic pallets, so that you could bleach everything down. One of the main goals when keeping a bunch of dogs indoors is to stop the spread of any illness. If an owner wanted their dog to get fresh air they would pay $10 extra to have their dog go out in a longer run for two hours. That run was about 50 feet long and could get sun. It was also all cement so that you could bleach the whole thing down and kill any germs that might be out there. I worked there through college. So that's my initial experience working with dogs. I was working with large numbers of dogs in individual runs. They're listening to each other bark. They're not able to make the choice of when to go to the bathroom, not exercising, just being stored.  This was the 90s, so working with dogs was pretty heavy handed. My boss at the time, the owner of the facility, was a retired police officer, and had retired police dogs there, and that was the mentality that he was bringing to the operation. A lot of physically manipulating dogs to get them to do what you want, forcing them to do what you want.  This was all very different from the thoughtfulness we bring to the individual dog and that dog’s experiences today.

After college, I started working at animal hospitals, where we were also using force, a lot of manhandling the dogs, getting them into positions, muzzling the dog so we can get blood or take X rays, focusing on the task at hand and how efficiently to do it, not considering how is this experience is affecting the dog. There was no thought of cooperation. This was over 20 years ago. I'm sure some people at that time were doing cooperative care, but it wasn't as popular as it is now, and there was a lot of manhandling and force.

 I got lucky, and I started a pet sitting and a dog walking business in 2006 to help supplement my income and free up time to go back to school. I loved it so much I didn’t bother continuing with classes. I absolutely loved getting to see dogs in their environment, their homes. Then I started taking groups of dogs to the dog park. I knew nothing like I know today, you're reading my history, I didn't know anything about groups of dogs, and so it was all on the job learning. I loved those dogs. They taught me so much. I loved to watch them play and loved to watch them develop their relationships. I was also doing a lot of pet sitting and you just bond with the dogs in a different way when you are part of their daily routine. It was a joy.

During this time in 2008, I adopted my first puppy through a rescue down in California. Chance was my soul dog.  She taught me so much. She is the reason I found positive reinforcement dog training and started pursuing professional dog training. My sweet puppy turned into a fearful pup in adolescence, and I wanted to do anything I could for her.  We went to a few trainers who opened my eyes to the world of behavior modification and fear free dog training.  I couldn’t get enough. I went to Clicker Expo and started taking classes whenever I could.  Chance is the reason I love to work with fearful or anxious dogs.  Getting to watch her grow through her fears, build skills and live a life feeling safe in her own skin was monumental both for her and for me. She was integral to my shifts in how we ran the business.

 I had that business until 2011 and then I moved to Colorado and proceeded to open another dog walking business. My goal, and my dream at that point was to have a dog farm, a place where the dogs would go. We bought a property in 2014, 10 acres, and I started boarding dogs out at the property. I absolutely loved it. The dogs got to run. They got to play with each other. I really enjoyed it and wanted to impact more dogs so I bought a dog daycare in Denver. It was small; max we had 25 dogs. I just wanted to work with groups of dogs again. I took over this daycare, and looking back, I am just shocked that I didn't realize how stressful a dog daycare is. When I took over there were injuries every week, and from what I learned, thanks to Facebook groups, is that it is pretty par for the course for daycares. There are great daycares out there, thoughtfully run but it is a unique environment, and there's only so much you can do to remove that stress and run a good daycare. We did everything that you could do. I started kicking dogs out. I went to membership only so that the dogs would all know each other. And I stopped offering boarding. I only offered it to the members, and I only boarded those dogs at my house. That significantly brought down the stress and nearly eliminated injuries. But still I didn't think it was good for the dogs, and I grew quite discontent with the operation. I just couldn't do it. Even with everything we were doing, we were doing naps and rotating dogs, we were training during the day, you could only be as good as the environment. And the environment was a warehouse with outdoor pea gravel and an astroturf system. If you just think about that environment, it is just man-made material and limited space. We had a fairly large yard for the space, but the dogs really couldn’t run. I was pretty disillusioned with dog daycare. I had a friend out here who wanted me to partner to take over a local daycare.  I just couldn't do it. This place didn't even have outdoor space and just walking in, I was hit by the smell of urine. It doesn't matter how many chemicals you're using when the business has been around for years that smell just saturates everything. 

I was pretty disillusioned with the business and the industry. But I was having a lot of fun bringing the dogs from the city out to my house when they boarded. Seeing the difference in the dogs started my research into what else could be possible.

 Luckily, I stumbled upon Teena at Doglando. She was offering an enrichment course for dog daycare owners. I signed up immediately and started taking her online masterclass. I feel very lucky because she's no longer offering this.  I got to do some classes with her about her vision of enrichment. Teena has a comprehensive vision of enrichment and continues to add to that vision based on her experiences in her "laboratory" Doglando. I'm really grateful that she also opened up her facility for us to come down and see firsthand how they were operating and how to put the principles into practice. I got to follow her team around and see what they did with the dogs and how they handled the dogs and what the dogs were free to do during the day. Watching their practice of enrichment, there was no going back. There is just no going back from that; to see what the dogs were doing and comparing it to having dogs in a traditional day care. Just seeing the joy and seeing the dogs run, like, actually get to run, the dogs foraging, and just having my mind blown by these dogs hunting together, not getting into fights, just really enjoying each other. And that just lit me up. As the Universe would have it, things aligned, and I closed the daycare. I didn't even sell it as I did not want to perpetuate the business. 

I started looking at properties and weighing my options. At the same time, I was wildly homesick, so my attention shifted back here. The Pacific Northwest is home. I absolutely love it. I think it's great for dogs and if you didn’t know, my life is all about dogs. I think it's a lot easier to have a dog here and get to do all the dog things with less risk. No rattlesnakes here, no black widows, no fire ants, there's water, there's trees, there's shade, it’s fairly temperate which is easy on the dogs.  

I started working for a dog walker friend while I was looking at properties out here. I was taking her groups to the dog park, and I was just seeing the dog park through different eyes, through a different lens, through different experiences.  I was so happy to just have the dogs there, playing together and getting to run, getting to swim, being in a more natural environment. This thing I had walked away from, which was doing groups of dogs at the dog park, just looked and felt different after having the daycare.

As we all know, there are limitations to the dog park and once COVID hit, more and more people were getting dogs, and more and more people were bringing dogs that didn't belong at the dog park. A lot of dogs were not properly socialized during the beginning of the pandemic, and then people are bringing those dogs because they need to run. There seemed to be more risk at the dog park, and after a couple of years of taking them, I was starting to get frustrated with those limitations especially for my more sensitive dogs.

In Spring 2023, my health had me take a step outside the business. And during that time, I found these SniffSpots. I couldn't have my dogs on leash because I couldn't have dogs pulling on my upper body. So, I found a spot where I could drive my dogs onto the property and let them out without ever having to have a leash on them. When I found these spots and I was watching my dogs, all I could think of was sharing it with my larger dog family.  I started going out there with dogs that were staying with me. At the time, I didn't really think we would do it as a business. It's a lot different; the driving being the biggest hurdle. I didn't see how it would be possible. Then at the end of 2023, we had the mysterious upper respiratory disease going through some dog populations.  Nobody was really sure what was going to happen, and it ended up just being a blip. I think we were all pretty triggered from COVID, and so thinking about something like that, going through our dogs, we just wanted to do what we could. I knew we could go to the Sniff Spots and have our dogs just with our dogs, and not sharing water with dogs we don't know, or playing with dogs we don't know. So we started going up to the SniffSpot and it just opened up a whole new world for the dogs. It was a done deal at that point. Watching dogs I hadn't seen play in a long time, play because they felt safe. Dogs get to explore and engage in different activities that was a done deal for me. 

We did have some dogs go back to the dog park when fears of the illness died down but splitting the dogs up and having some dogs bored at the park we ended up back at the SniffSpots. The environment provides more for the dogs than we have found anywhere else and because the dogs' experience is our motivating principle here we are.