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ed-al-elric · 4 years ago

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Pet Keepers Mount Pleasant. WARNING from former employees of Pet Keepers for current clients/ future clients and future employees.

Disclaimer: In an attempt to be fair, not over exaggerate and stay truthful this has been over tooth and comb to ensure nothing is not inconsistent with the facts of only our personal knowledge and experiences. If you bring your pets here I think it’s worth a read.

From me: (Most speaks of current day PK’s)

I implore you to take your pets elsewhere. The owners of this establishment are apathetic to there employees causing unintended mistreatment of the animals, specifically dogs. First off the owners opted to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to do tons of expensive remodeling, sacrificing there workers to do so. Meanwhile as there business picked back up they chose to keep a skeleton crew and actually demanded even more work of them.

I left due to Covid and loved my job with PK’s when the demands were equal to the pay.

How the work day was set up was rational at first. Having three employees at any time kept there system moving and even when the amount of dogs got in the 40+ range it was still doable.

How things got after my leaving they would have two employees for the back. One for bathing (let’s not even bring up that scam; if you have a long haired dog skip this place for your walk in bath, they don’t properly brush out your dog and can actually make the grooming process harder for your pet stylist. They basically dry in mats after the bath.) and the other employee for walking the dogs. That’s one person dedicated to walking dogs, cleaning cages, feeding, check ins and check outs. This means on many occasions the time your dog gets in the yard is drastically cut, as soon as your dog does it’s business it’s back to the cage. The people who work for this company are not uncaring, they love animals. However they are not given enough help to take the time for each individual animal to get the proper time and attention so that there time spent isn’t almost completely in a kennel. Even when I worked there, without cutting down to three then four employees sometimes this spoke true due to constantly being understaffed.

The worst however was the lack of care of there employees, one in particular whom worked for them 15+ years. This particular employee was going through family woes caring for an elderly relative and found themselves with no time to take a breather. When asked multiple times for time off they were given the smug response “we cannot justify hiring a new employee just so you can get time off” This particular employee was then left no choice but to resign. The owners in the last deed of complete apathy decided to blame them and make crude remarks on there appearance. Quote “Knew they were worn out because they looked like shit” For the record the individual who said this apologized to the employee but nothing on earth gave them the right to say it in the first place. This employee gave so much of there passion and energy to there business and this was the thank you they got. I’m dumbfounded.

From another employee: (Speaks of PK’s in the time which we were both employed)

There are prior instances of the owners of Pet Keepers being highly apathetic to not only their staff, but the other boarding clients. Often, the owners would leave their own dogs at the boarding kennel on busy holidays or drop them off for walk-in baths on busy days such as Friday without even so much as tipping the bather one dollar (for reference, every dog earns the bather $1 on top of their general hourly pay). This could be argued as normal, but there were situations in which the employees and other dogs suffered due to the insolence of the owners. One particular event was when the entire floor of the main hallway of the back kennel was being remodeled on short notice during a weekend in the summer time, a time where there would be an influx of dogs. The contractors that were hired to remodel the hallway could only do weekends, and for some reason, the owner decided to not wait until a less congested, more convenient and less-stressful time to schedule the remodel. Due to this remodel, dogs of all sizes, with people paying based off of weight (in which dogs of larger weights would be put in bigger cages or runs, adding more to the cost) would be rearranged and “shoved” (for lack of a better word) into the bath kennel in smaller cages with less room. On top of that, the owners decided it would be a “wonderful” idea to drop their own three dogs off for the employees to not only take care of along with other paying clients dogs, but also rearrange and squeeze into an already crammed bath kennel that had minimal air conditioning and room for anyone to move around in. And to further clarify, we had medium dogs in small cages and large dogs in medium cages. We could not keep any dogs in any of the runs in the back kennel due to the remodeling, even when their owners had specifically paid for a larger weight dog and, in consequence, a run.

While working at Pet Keepers, we used several cleaning products in the start that adequately deodorized and disinfected all surfaces. These were Odo-Ban and Kennelsol. If you have worked in a veterinary office, or any other establishment with small animals, these products are easily recognizable as they are very popular and actually cleaned while maintaining a decent smell. The employees at Pet Keepers were properly trained in using these products to clean all surfaces (such as cages, runs, countertops, etc.) and the environment after a hefty cleaning session (such as during open hours on Sunday) reflected this. However, in mid-2019, one of the owners of Pet Keepers was gullibly persuaded into switching over to a new cleaning product, one that did no effort to deodorize or disinfect surfaces properly, and also did not allow for the disintegration of “crusted on” substances, so to speak. It also cost more, along with new equipment to use this cleaning product, equipment that could have been purchased through cheaper means and used for other, more effective products used previously. Cleaning habits at the workplace by the employees did not change, except for the introduction of this new cleaner and the phasing out of the old methods. “Surprisingly”, new bordetella (kennel cough) cases arose (occasionally) after switching over to this new cleaner, and the employees were being blamed despite using the new cleaner generously and maintaining routine habits from beforehand. It is questionable to me, as someone who has previously worked in a veterinary setting, why you would switch from a reputable product such as Kennelsol to one that was essentially hydrogen peroxide. Perhaps it was because Kennelsol wasn’t “whitening” enough. The equipment that had to be used with this cleaning product was low-quality, certainly not meant for use in a kennel or veterinary setting (where it would get used numerous times per day) and it would often break under normal circumstances and require new equipment to be mailed in and being way less cost-effective than anything used previously. Other employees found it routine to bring in other cleaning products (bought with their own money) to work to clean the surfaces that the “new and improved” cleaner was not able to touch. If they did not do this, often they would be blamed and accused for not cleaning surfaces, cages, etc. properly enough despite maintaining cleaning habits prior to introduction to the new cleaner.

On a separate occasion, two employees survived a traumatic car crash that caused minor brain injury in one. The two employees had to take a few days off of work after the accident to not only work out legal matters, but also confirm that no more serious injuries had occurred. Both were being seen by doctors at the time. When returning to work approximately six days after the accident occurred, a relatively new supervisor (not the manager of Pet Keepers, but a supervisor at the veterinary hospital next door) instructed that wet, heavy bags of rubber mulch be poured onto the yards and spread. Please note, that while “lifting heavy objects” is in the job description of Pet Keepers, this refers to dogs that may not be able to get up and down easily, not giant bags of rubber mulch. Also, the employees of Pet Keepers were never expected to maintain the appearance of the yards besides cleaning them after the dogs went out. Landscaping was never in the job description for employees at Pet Keepers, the owners frequently used a landscaping company multiple times a month, and the pay rate does not justify the labor that is required for landscaping work. The two employees along with the others working that day spread the mulch as instructed, causing one to almost pass out due to the frequent bending over and lifting that was required of this particular task. She later was informed by her doctor that she had suffered a minor concussion due to the accident and should not have been performing labor that extensive that soon after the accident occurred. While this employee should not have gone back to work so soon after the accident, she felt as if she had no choice because of how short-staffed PK was at that point, and also this was not a task that was normally expected of us, ever, prior to working there before the accident. On a “positive” note, during the renovations (that were performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which many small businesses went under and flat-out closed), fake grass was put down in place of the rubber mulch, adding insult to injury making everything done that day for nothing.

There were multiple times where dangerous dogs were boarded without consideration for the safety of not only other dogs, but the employees. PK does pride itself in boarding dog-aggressive dogs, and takes appropriate measures to ensure safety of all dogs of all sizes. No dog is taken out with another dog if it is not of the same family, they do not cross paths hardly ever, even when being checked in or out. Prospective employees of Pet Keepers are informed of the slant towards dog aggressive dogs when applying and interviewing for their positions. However, people-aggressive dogs are not a part of the expectations or commonly discussed when applying for the position. Despite this, the owners allowed multiple people-aggressive dogs to be boarded at their facility multiple times, causing injury and distress to the employees while the dogs boarded. Due to the nature of this boarding facility, with every dog needing to be taken out separately and always with the supervision of an employee, we must be able to put a slip lead on the dogs in order to lead them to their respective yards and ensure that they will not come in contact with any other dog. When you have a people-aggressive husky, or German shepherd, or any larger dog that can actually do damage to anyone trying to get close to them, it makes the job much harder and walks take much longer as other measures that would not normally be performed must be taken. On one occurrence, a people-aggressive husky bit the hand of an employee trying to get him from out of his run to go to a routine veterinary appointment. She was bitten so hard that the dog broke her finger, and she had to receive medical attention. Though the employee chose to not get workman’s compensation, some sort of adequate and meaningful compensation or attention would have been commonplace in any other job. She was also forced to come back to work too soon after this event considering that we were still short-staffed. On a separate occasion, a people-aggressive, anxiety-ridden German shepherd boarded in this facility with no consideration for employee safety. This is a dog that was aggressive when scared and would lunge at employees out of fear and aggression. When trying to check this dog out, he got loose in the kennel during the last walk of the day. Luckily, the kennel techs managed to sequester him and block him off from other dogs so that he would not cause injury to any passing dog during the walk. However, it still took all the kennel techs available that day to basically interrupt the walk and place a slip-lead on him to get him to the front. Again, I reiterate, this dog would lunge at employees when feeling threatened and aggressive, and the employees were not in any way trained to deal with this sort of situation, and we did not have adequate equipment to deal with these people-aggressive dogs, using only rope slip-leads to lasso the dogs in an attempt at control.

When hired-on, PK had next to ten employees, that slowly dwindled down to five. There were many times where it was required that 3-4 people would be working during a single day, not counting a receptionist. Obviously, with only five people, this would not be easy to accomplish, and the morale with the employees and the dogs decreased because of it. Requesting days off became a fruitless effort since no amount of scheduling could redeem or compensate the lack of employees, creating a workplace in which whenever someone took days off, they were essentially making workdays for other employees ten times harder with one person down and no way to reconcile or find a substitute. Normally, I would argue that most places of business experience times where they have higher turnover than hires, and it’s not entirely unusual for a business to find itself in a slump and lose people due to life circumstances such as moves, school, etc.. However, PK could not keep many worthwhile employees due to either difficulty of the job, or inadequate pay relative to the amount of labor. Many would find themselves believing it was not worth working somewhere for ten hours a day, from 7 in the morning until six in the evening, for less than ten dollars an hour.

In conclusion the lack of proper employee treatment, equipment, and staffing can and will effect the care of the animals regardless of intent.

#mtpleasant #Charleston #south carolina #petboarding

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