The recent deaths of 14 dogs at a Saskatoon kennel highlighted the difference between boarding humans and animals. Much like the dogs, I was once in a hotel room that had a major heating system malfunction which made the room itself inhospitable, and if forced to stay in that room overnight it could have been dangerous. In my case, since I am not a dog, I was able to make a complaint to the front desk. I was moved to a different room as the hotel staff worked to fix the heating unit and make it turn off. If the dogs were able to complain to the front desk, they probably would have been fine, but they’re dogs, they can only bark and cannot operate a telephone or a door. What was an easy obstacle to deal with for a human is an insurmountable mountain for a dog.
One can argue that this case could have been prevented. I can even give you a pretty good idea about how you do it. Install a redundant temperature sensor that is not connected to the main climate control system – this way, it’s not connected to a unit that might fail. That temperature sensor is then connected to a system that automatically places a call to someone – possibly several people, because redundancy is something you want to build into any security system – if the temperature falls outside of a certain operating range. It’s not an extremely complicated system to set up, all of the individual components are used for other systems anyway, so it’s something that can and should be required for any service that boards animals.
There will be plenty of talk about what can, and should, be required for any animal boarding service in the wake of this incident, and I might argue that any extra regulations that pop up as a result might start from the same place, examine what the animal can’t deal with that a human can, and as a result, things that we might overlook when we start to consider how we should set up our animal accommodations. The temperature system was overlooked because, for the most part, this was a rare occurrence. People don’t expect the heater to jam on, and even if it does, in most cases it’s not something that you’re going to actually have to worry about. Employees would start to complain that it’s way too hot, that would lead to a check, and so on. In this case, we had something that could only be a problem for animals, because people can work around it fairly easily. Unfortunately, for 14 dogs and their families, we have discovered the only usage case where this is actually dangerous, and it’s one that we innocently didn’t realize because it’s a case that is a complete non-issue for people. We can react against it, but that’s cold comfort.
It’s easy to say, after the fact, that there should have been regulations in place, but at the time it was hard to realize that it was a problem. While my solution might be easy enough to implement and a good way to prevent any similar incidents in the future, would I have even thought about it had this not happened? I can argue now that this is something all animal boarding services can, and should, do, but it’s also not obvious that was the case until you hit an incident where it could have helped. It’s much easier to solve the problems of the past than it is to prevent the problems of the future.
There will undoubtedly be a push to more heavily regulate any animal boarding in the future thanks to this incident, but we are going to be in the tricky position of figuring out what we need to actually regulate. I would not imagine that this incident could have taken place and I actually had roughly the same thing happen to me, how can we predict what could go fatally wrong in a kennel? It’s a very difficult question to answer, especially since it’s going to be things that definitely would not go wrong for your average person.
Whoever has the challenge of adding to the standards these places have to abide by has to take the unorthodox step of taking a dog’s eye view of the situation. They have to not only look at obvious problems, such as the standard of care, access to food and that kind of thing, but also have to think about stuff we take for granted because we can easily interact with the people around us. It’s going to be a major challenge to figure out what, exactly, a dog might find a problem because it’s going to be something we don’t recognize.
It’s a job worth doing, because no family deserves to lose a family member before their time, due to circumstances which could have been prevented. These dogs were family members, all dogs are, whether they’re in the house or living outside on the farm, and we want to do what we can to make sure they are healthy and safe. I’m not going to blame the people in the kennel for what amounts to a freak accident, as sad as it is, but I hope that if we are planning to regulate these kennels more closely, we can prevent this from happening again.
