Before we left for our vacation to Nashville and Memphis I wrote on Facebook all my worries. Despite the fact that we've been pet sitters since 2009 I have never personally used a pet sitting service for an extended vacation. The main reason is we've never had a chance to take an extended vacation together. When I'd travel with my friend Danny to go watch baseball Lara would be at home and when Lara would travel for horse events I'd be at home. Since moving to Virginia Beach

Being a pet sitter/dog walker isn't all puppies and rainbows as I've mentioned before, and at times we are called into a situation that is beyond our control. The dog has too much energy, is being destructive when his or her family is at work, and his or her family wants him or her walked to get it out. The problem in this situation is the dog owners view pet sitting/dog walking as a cure all, a magic bullet, that will get all the dog's energy out and stop the destructive beh

All the advise that I have read says I need to write at least one blog post a week. As I had no ideas and would rather use the rare free time I have to do something else I dilly dallied through the first couple days of this week and then still without an idea today I used the power of Google. I entered "Why do dogs..." looked at the auto-fill results and picked one of the more popular ones. It is cheating a bit in a way as the purpose of blogging is to help us show better in

with Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War is currently tearing up the theaters and setting records, the trailer for Luke Cage season 2 just dropped, and the DC universe still trying to make movies super powers are all the rage. While super strength and speed might be good for saving the world they wouldn't be the most ideal powers for a pet sitter. So what powers would help out in our lives helping to care for your pets? While I can't say for certain I've come up with three that

When you start a business one of the first thing all the guide books tell you to do is to define your higher principle. In other words why do you do what you do. The reason for this is easy to understand. Think about how much of an insult it is to say someone is only in it for the money. It is saying hey have no passion or caring and are only doing a job as a means to an end. This is why this is where you start. Define your passion before you ever make a sale and no one can a

The other day I realized that I graduated college in 2005, worked for my father's company until 2011, and have been a pet sitter/dog walker since 2012. That means that I've been walking dogs and sitting pets for as long as I've done anything else in my professional life, and it doesn't look like that is going to end anytime soon. With that being said I wanted to take a moment to reflect back and share my top moments as a dog walker over the course of a few blog posts. Typical

Going for a walk with your dog on a nice Spring day can be a relaxing and fun experience. For your dog it is a great time to enjoy being outside and time with their best friend. For you it is much the same. But dog walks can become more of a chore than a fun adventure with a friend so here are a few tips to have a fun and exciting walk with your dog. 1. Make the walk the primary focus This one isn't as straight forward as it seems. If a dog needs to go potty on a walk they're

When we meet with a potential dog walker/pet sitter to add to the Stable Hands team we may not be looking for what you think. We grade all interviews on the 20-80 baseball scouting scale and have determined that the five tools of pet sitting are; 1. Reliability-- Can this person be counted on to do what they say they will? 2. Punctuality-- Will they show up on time? 90% of this job is showing up. 3. Communication-- Will they be able to communicate with clients and us in a pro

There are times when you want to forget all your troubles, forget all your cares and you don't have the time nor inclination to go downtown. You just want someone to talk to. Tell them how your day has been, but the problem with people is they will then want to tell you how their day was and sometimes you just aren't in the mood to have a conversation. You just want someone to listen. That's where pets come in. Last night I joked on my personal Facebook page that my memoir wo

For pet sitting and dog walking we typically use the equipment the pet owner provides and what the pet is familiar and comfortable with. With that being said there is equipment we do prefer to use and think is optimal for a pet's safety and well being. A good and relaxing dog walk all starts with the proper equipment. Here is what we recommend as the best equipment to have a safe and fun walk with your dog. The Freedom and Balance Harness We will start off with the Freedom Ha

I remember the moment it happened with utmost clarity. It was tax season 2015 and I was walking a beagle after having just gone over the taxes. We ended up owing quite a bit and I couldn't figure out why. We'd paid our estimated taxes and we should have had money coming back to us. Then I looked at what we'd made and started to understand what had happened. Two things had occurred simultaneously. The first is we had worked ourselves into a higher tax bracket and our accountan

This past Saturday we held our first ever Doggy Easter Egg Hunt. With the amount of eggs we littered the ground with it was a very poor attempt at hide and seek since we made close to no effort to hide the eggs. I later put a couple eggs in the backyard for Riley and he eventually found one of them (sometimes I wonder about his hound dog nose). He also had no idea we were playing a game at the time or that I'd hidden the eggs. I should have shown them to him and let him snif

In the world of behavior modification there exists what we call The Human Hierarchy of Behavioral Change. It is a very simple concept to understand but not one many people practice. When a dog misbehaves the traditional thinking is to jump straight to punishment. That is that the behavior you don't want needs to be corrected. We have gone over the issues with punishment in a previous post but let's recap that punishment has been shown to not be effective mainly because the ti

A lot of times as dog walkers we are called in to work with dogs that are new to their home and we find people with a lot of differing ideas on how a dog should behave. One time we were told that the dog needed to be broken of the habit of sniffing on the walk. At this point we have two options. The first option is to be responsible business owners and dog walkers and explain that when you hire us you get our philosophies and beliefs about dog behavior and that we believe tha

I have heard tales of the dog that does not like treats. I have yet to meet this dog and in my time as a pet sitter/dog walker I have met hundreds of dogs. All of them have liked treats. They may not have liked a certain type or a certain flavor of treats, but they all liked treats. Even the dogs that were the pickiest of picky eaters would take treats. The people that tell me that dogs don't like treats are normally those pushing a punishment based form of training. And here

As a pet sitter/dog walker I interact with a lot of dogs on a daily basis and many display undesirable behavior. In my role as a pet sitter/dog walker I am also an animal trainer. While this isn't directly what I'm being paid for in this role it is the reality that we deal with and it is always important when working with animals to keep in mind that you get the behavior that you reinforce, but their is another part to the operant conditioning spectrum and that is punishment,

Dogs jumping on people is one of the most common problems we hear about and deal with at meet and greets in our roll as in home pet care specialists. As with any unwanted or undesired dog behavior it is first important to understand why it happens. The big reason it happens is your dog is happy to see you or your guest or anyone in general. Dogs jumping on people is a greeting of sorts. Your dog just wants to say hi but more importantly they want to know what information you

In the dog world, the leader always goes first. A dog who races to the door ahead of his owner is showing disrespect, and doesn’t see the human as the alpha of his pack. -- Unattributed out of respect to your brain function. When I read the above quote and I think about how I never conditioned Riley to wait for me to go outside before him and of all the dogs I walk on a daily basis as a dog walker that go out the door first so I can close it behind us I never once think it is

As in home pet care professionals it is important that we have an understanding of animal behavior. We walk dogs and pet sit for cats on a daily basis. If we didn't understand animal behavior we'd be pretty bad at this job and even worse at training our staff. It is important for us to have a knowledge base to wok from so here are the books I've been reading to help me to understand our pet friends just a little bit better. Each picture will be a hyperlink and for the synopsi

I've written a lot recently on my view of human and dog interaction and I've skirted around the old way of thinking. Yesterday I was faced with a somewhat awkward conversation as I was on the phone with a trained that preferred the archaic compulsion technique of training. He told me that operant conditioning just didn't work on some breeds of dogs and that you had to gain their respect through punishment. While I do believe that negative stimulus is required for full spectru