Our In-Home Visit service is widely used for its benefit of keeping animals in their own homes and on their same routine in the absence of their owners. For long vacation trips, the money can really add up so owners typically hire us for a portion of the time and get a friend to handle the remainder of the time. This is what pet sitters call “job sharing”, and quite a few pet sitters will not accept these kinds of jobs because of potential problems working with the owners friend. We have no problem job sharing providing the following is adhered to:
[checklist]
[/checklist]
We experienced a situation a little while back where we hadn’t been told that a family friend would also be taking care of the pets. Hence, since we didn’t hear from the owners alerting us to their safe arrival home, an emergency drop-by visit was done, which shed the light on pets that had not been cared for since our last scheduled visit due to the family friend never having showed up—scary stuff for the poor owners, us and, of course, the pets!
Somewhat along these same lines are situations involving house guests. Especially during the summer while owners are traveling, they lend their house out to friends who need a place to crash while they too are traveling. House guests are completely good with us provided you follow the criteria below:
[checklist]
[/checklist]
You may be wondering why this is such a big deal so we’ll give you a real-life example.
Take a house that has a dog on medication or a very strict diet. A house guest is staying at your house but you forget to tell her that you have a pet sitter come by to care for your pets. So, your house guest sees the pills for Rover, the food laying out and assumes it’s her duty to give Rover his medication and feed him. What she doesn’t know is that the pet sitter already came by and gave Rover his medication for that day along with food and water.
Bottom line: Rover received too much medication, which depending on the medication, could be an emergency trip to the vet clinic.