The Strange and Stressful Side of Pet Sitting Part 1

The majority of the time, pet sitting was fun and enjoyable - exactly how I'd romanticized it to be. However, in my three years as a sitter, I did upwards of 100 jobs and, statistically speaking, they couldn't have all been winners.

For a bit of context, I worked as both an employee of Rover and a freelance pet sitter between the ages of 20 and 23. During that time, I encountered my fair share of strange dogs, difficult clients, and problems I created for myself due to my tendency to panic in crisis situations. These stories are my personal anecdotes about the gigs that I only managed to get through because I kept telling myself “well, at least it’ll make a good story” when it was over. Names and locations have been changed.

Story 1: Mina and Harris

I’m choosing to begin with this story because it was one of those gigs where I found myself considering switching professions while I was doing it.

As a pet sitter, whenever someone requests to book you, it's customary to first schedule a "meet and greet" where you can meet the dogs and talk to the owners about their needs. However, during this particular one, I could barely hear what the owners were saying due to the snarling and barking from the dogs in the next room. The owners never once let them out so I could actually meet them which I found odd, but their barking drowned out the sound of alarm bells going off in my head.

When I arrived at the house to begin my stay, I sat in the living room and read the note the owners left me while I waited for the dogs to quiet down. I was relieved that they wrote me one because I learned very little during the meet and greet.

As I read, it became more and more difficult to ignore the red flags that had been waving in my face since the start. The note was as much of a warning as it was a list of instructions. It was also riddled with lies, although I didn’t know it at the time.

One such lie was that one of the dogs - we’ll call her Mina - liked to “be gross” and eat the other dog’s poop. This was a lie for two reasons. One, it wasn’t gross, it was revolting. Her owners said they were trying to break her of this habit but it had been difficult because - two - she didn’t just like it, she relished it.

Every time I would let the dogs out to go potty, the smaller dog - we’ll call him Harris - immediately pooped and mere seconds after it had hit the ground, Mina had devoured the pile. I watched in disgust as she gobbled up the turds and swallowed them whole, suggesting to me that it wasn’t so much the taste or texture she found pleasure in, but the activity itself.

In addition to being gross, she was also extremely weird. For one thing, she never stopped moving. She constantly wanted to play fetch and I would play until my arm was killing me, but she still had just as much energy, if not more, than she did when we started.

When I had no choice but to stop playing and do my school work, I would sit at the kitchen table as she paced around me like a shark encircling its prey. She paced like that for hours, never once stopping or taking her eyes off me. Needless to say, I got very little work done.

When she got bored of pacing she would use Harris as her own personal chew toy and bite and nip at him until eventually they’d get into a fight and I’d have to break it up. She had plenty of toys; he just happened to be her favorite.

The note said that they would sleep in their kennels all night with little complaint, which was a lie because Mina never slept. I could hear her at all hours of the night moving around, whining, and barking. Sometimes she would stand in the doorway of my room, still as a statue, just staring at me in the darkness.

She didn’t sleep at any point during the day either. Once in a great while she would lay down, but it wasn’t because she was tired. The note said that laying down was one of the ways she signaled that she wanted to play more. I was warned that if I didn’t want to play, I shouldn’t turn or try to move away from her because in doing so, I would be “relinquishing the hierarchy”. The note didn’t specify what she would do to me once the hierarchy was relinquished, but I think she would’ve killed me and made my skin into a lampshade.

The only time Mina left me alone is when she would do her favorite activity besides eating poop, which was to look out the two large windows in the living room. This would've been fine except whenever something moved outside, she would growl a deep, threatening, almost demonic growl preceded by a very loud bark.

She had a list of German commands that she’d been taught, one being "ruhig sein" which meant "be quiet" (another was "schnap" which meant snap her jaws - terrifying) and I tried saying this to her, but she paid me no mind. So she would growl/bark for a few minutes, go quiet long enough for me to feel somewhat at ease, then start up again. I jumped out of my seat and practically shit myself every time.

But as much as I feared Mina when she wasn’t quiet, I learned to fear her even more when she was.

At one point during my stay, there was a stint of time when she wasn’t pacing, barking, fighting, or playing, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she had fallen asleep and I could finally get some work done. I needed to study for an important exam that I was scheduled to take at my college that evening.

As I studied, I kept getting the occasional whiff of something foul-smelling. It was faint, too faint to identify what it was, so I figured it was just something nasty in the trash. However, as I was leaving for my exam and heading to the garage, the smell became more intense.

To get to the garage in this house, you had to go down a flight of stairs and past a door that opened into the basement living room. The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open reluctantly, fearful of what I might find. As soon as I did, I was hit with the overpowering smell of feces, which is always worse when it’s confined to an indoor space and not free to stink up the outdoors.

Smack dab in the middle of the living room was the largest, runniest pile of poop I'd ever seen. This was why Mina had been so quiet. Of course she hadn’t been sleeping. She’d been outside so much that day that I didn’t think I needed to worry about that happening, but then again, I’d sat for plenty of dogs that pooped in the house even if they practically lived outside. I was already running late and couldn’t miss my exam, so I had no choice but to wait and clean it up later.

After I got home, I armed myself with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of cleaning fluid and descended into the cesspit. By this point, the poop had been sitting there for several hours and a dark gray film had formed over it like the kind that forms on top of nacho cheese in a school cafeteria. It was the texture and consistency of applesauce and the smell only got worse as I cleaned.

I’d sat for plenty of dogs that had gotten diarrhea due to the stress of their owners being gone, but this was something else entirely. Because the majority of Mina’s diet consisted of Harris’s poop, what I was dealing with was poop that had been digested and then expelled in the form of more poop. It took me a while to get it all clean and there was still a sizable stain on the carpet that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard I tried.

From then on, I kept a constant watch on both of them. Harris wasn’t too bad; his worst quality was that he constantly nipped at you. I couldn’t tell you what his fur felt like because every time I tried to pet him he would nip at me. He would even walk alongside me and jump up to bite my fingers. Still, he was a walk in the park compared to Mina.

It wasn’t a long stay, only three days, but it felt like an eternity. The next time the owners tried to book me, I ended up telling them I was transferring to another college that was several states away.