Vacation: Leaving Your Dog with Someone Else

Finding the perfect person to look after your dog is always tough. Will they love your dog as much as you; pay attention to his needs; take him for walks; treat him humanely etc... Once you verified and are comfortable with all this you may think your problems are solved. I would like to share one more bit of information which my wife and I found out the hard way. Fortunately, our story had a great ending.

My wife and I recently travelled to England and France to visit relatives and celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday. Before leaving, we had to leave our Lab/Sheppard, Kobi, with friends. All was fine as we departed for our trip. Our friend had all of Kobi's toys, food, medication, etc. The shocking news happens when we returned.

We arrived home at 2:30 in the morning and my father was nice enough to meet us at the airport. The next morning my wife decided to check our messages. The first two messages left us feeling very nervous. The day we departed, it seems our dog had escaped from our dogsitter's backyarded.

The first message was a women explaining to us that she had found our dog (we had a tag on Kobi's collar with his name and our number) if we could please call her as soon as possible.

The second message was the same lady explaining that she could not keep Kobi because she had a Boxer of her own. The lady said she was going to take Kobi to the SPCA because she had no other choice. Taking into consideration we had just left for our two week vacation, Kobi, would be stuck at the SPCA for a long time. I'm not sure about the SPCA policy, but a dog with no owner for 2 weeks is not a good situation for our loving Kobi.

Lucky for us, our dogsitter was smart enough to call the SPCA and retrieve Kobi.

Lesson learned, sometimes weird things happen that we wouldn't think of. My suggestion is to make a new tag for your dog with an emergency number belonging to the dogsitter. You can usually create these tags yourself at your local big chain pet store. For under $10, this is a great way to secure your dog will be safe and sound.