I hate to have to be writing this but I feel it's needed to spread the word about our bad experience and to keep other dogs safe. To preface, we have been sending our dogs to daycare here for over a year now and they always came back in good shape. Our dogs are young and high energy, so we know the risks of daycare and boarding facilities and that scuffles and disagreements in the yard can happen. However, I can't let this one go and want to others.
Yesterday, I dropped my dog Cora off for a fun day at daycare and received a phone call around 10 am staring that she was very injured and was going to the vet to be looked over and call back asap. I called them back within 5 minutes, and got the answering service. I then called 4 other times over the course of 20 minutes without hearing back. I was at work, so in the time I packed up and got in the car, it had been 45 minutes of not hearing anything. I had friends and my fiancé calling and finally my fiancé got a hold of them after calling a few times. They explained she had a wound but they didn't know what happened and that she needed to go to vet. She never called me back personally. When I got there, my dog was by herself in her kennel. Starla, the manager, was completely unphased, slowly finished up work on her desk computer and on phone with clients all while telling me to just wait a second. I didn't know where Cora was or what her condition was. She didn't say what vet she was taking her to. It sounded like she was taking her ASAP. She eventually brings her down after I demanded she go get her, all while trying to tell me she will be fine and it's not that bad. She said they will pay for the vet bill. At first, my dog seemed okay and like it was just a flesh wound that needed to be looked over and maybe a few stitches. I decided to take her myself to the vet and communicated where I was taking her. I put a towel down in my car because I noticed she was bleeding. (At end of the day, I had to throw the towel away because of the amount of blood that was pouring out of her wound and the vet office had to mop the floor because of her blood)
We waited over 3 hours at the vet to be seen, and it turned out she needed 4 stitches internally and 4 outer stitches and was deeper and more painful than we realized. It took the yard dog hours to call the vet back and pay for the bill as the vet could not operate on her until they called back and claimed financial responsibility. So, my dog was sitting in the vet office in pain for longer than necessary at this point that as owners, we were about to just pay the bill so we could get the surgery started and get her pain relief. I texted their text line around 1 pm for Starla to call me back and she never did. The vet said that there was no way this was from a scuffle, and something had to have punctured her and it didn't seem like a tooth but something in the play yard or someone had done it to her themselves. No one called me back the rest of the day or texted to check in on her.
I called this morning and spoke with Starla again. She never asked how she was doing. She was defensive and argumentative from the get go and was not open at all to hearing how this was unacceptable and poor communication. I explained that I'm not upset that Cora got hurt but by how this was handled. I also felt like them truly not knowing what hurt her so badly was concerning. They refused to let me look through the cameras to see what happened. I asked for higher up management contact info and Starla would not give it to me and stated she did not have that info, although she stated she communicates any and all injuries with them previously.
I am glad they paid for her vet bills but the way Starla handled this and the lack of compassion they had around this has me forced to never bring my dogs back and wonder from now on what I wasn't told and what really happened. read more