I work at a Dogtopia location in New York state. It's a doggie daycare/boarding/grooming chain with a number of locations across the US. I'm a “Canine Coach”, which is basically just a cutesy name for a room monitor. My job is to set up one of the three play rooms (dogs are usually assigned to a room based on their size/weight) by 7 AM and then take care of the dogs booked for boarding and daycare until noon, which is when I crate the dogs for “nap time” and clean the room for the PM shift. It can be a little tedious – refilling water bowls, cleaning up poop and pee, making sure the dogs don't get into any fights, etc. – but it's nice to be able to play and form connections with them.
Our facility is pretty small and we can be short-staffed sometimes, which wouldn't be so bad if we weren't consistently overwhelmed with just how many dogs are being booked. The maximum capacity for each room is 50 dogs – this means that a single monitor may be expected to watch and care for 50 dogs at a time. Of course, there's also people that have to manage each dog's feeding, medications, and grooming behind the scenes. I love dogs, I always will, but when I'm expected to keep track of the social relationships, behavioral issues, sensitivities and needs of more than 20 animals, patience wears thin fast and I become a much more irritable and unsympathetic person. I get angry at the dogs and end up taking out my frustrations on them – shouting, swearing, tugging them around by the collar or shoving them instead of taking the time to properly direct them. I end up cutting corners because I'm too emotionally exhausted to care. I hate getting out of a shift and coming to terms with how awful I had to be to get through it.
My breaking point was a couple of week ago. I had 33 mid-to-large breed dogs in my room (sometimes the mid-size and large-size rooms will merge if there's less than 50 between the two, just so they don't have to clean another room). It wasn't the most dogs I've ever been forced to watch – we ended up over-capacity one day in the summer and I had to deal with 53. It wasn't the first time I'd cried during my shift either, but I made the mistake of venting my frustrations to the employee group chat. The boss called me in during my break and told me that I was being “unfair” because this was the standard that everyone had to learn to work with, and that it is my job to remain calm and get through the shift however I can without getting angry or acting “rude”. I tried to plead my case that nobody could possibly provide meaningful care to this many dogs at a time, but by this point I started having a panic attack and had to leave early.
I am going to quit this job. My plan is to work part-time on the weekends until I graduate from college in May and hopefully by then I'll have something else lined up. My problem is that I know that even after I'm gone the dogs coming into our daycare will probably just keep getting crammed into rooms with monitors and staff that can't keep all of them safe, clean, and healthy. This company is actively creating an unsafe environment for these animals. I want it to change but I don't know what to do. I don't know if it's actually breaking any laws and I don't know who I can talk to.