Planet Pooch Reviews

Understaffed. The owner, Dan, advertises that the dogs are never left alone, but they often are. I was often left completely alone with 60-80 dogs separated in 4 different play areas. It was impossible to watch them all at once. There were a lot of fights and injuries. Thank god an emergency vet is down the street from that place because I had to take several dogs there. On one of my last days working there, a dog bit another dogs ear off when the owner left a brand new employee alone in the high energy/big dog play area. I took the dog to the emergency vet myself because Dan wasn’t there. My clothes, face, and car were covered in blood. All the employees had to fight to get Dan to kick that dog out. The worst incident I experienced was on Christmas Eve when he left me completely alone at the facility with 80 + dogs. An aggressive dog that should not have been allowed at a cage free daycare mauled another dog. It was a massive 100+ pound pit bull mix. It took me so long to get it off of the other dog by myself. Dan requires everyone to carry pepper spray in case of a fight, but the pepper spray cans he provided did not work. I had leave the play area and search around the facility for a can that wasn’t jammed. It took two cans off pepper spray to get the pit bull to let go of the other dog. During this process other dogs in the room started to pack around me and bite my legs. I had multiple scratches and punctures, and two of them left scars. He didn’t report my injuries or report the dog bite and quarantine the dog that bit me. He told me this was just part of the job. I foolishly believed him at the time. That was the most terrifying thing I have ever been through in my entire life. By leaving me alone there, Dan put the safety and lives of the dogs and myself at risk. If that pit bull had let go of the other dog and attacked me I would have been helpless. Thankfully the dog survived, but it was severely injured and the owners were devastated. Dan, the owner, is abusive. 1) He has anger management issues. If he’s in a “mood” any little thing will set him off. He would literally scream at me and the other women that worked there for making tiny mistakes. I was always under so much stress and pressure. He made me cry several times and once had to leave work early because he gave me a panic attack. To excuse this behavior, he’d tell me stories about how he was abused as a child. I didn’t want to hear about my boss’s personal life. It was so unprofessional and made me uncomfortable. He was just trying to get me to feel bad for him so I would tolerate the abuse. He also told me I was his favorite employee, and that’s why he got extra disappointed whenever I messed up. He was so manipulative. If I was his favorite employee, why did he pay me at least two dollars less than anyone else? 2) Dan sexually harassed me and the other women that worked there. It happened daily. It was very subtle at first and I just told myself he was just a creepy old man who didn’t know any better. But it kept getting worse and I know he knew I was uncomfortable. He’d tell me graphic stories about his sex life. It was disgusting. He’d make comments about my body literally every single day. He’d ask me about my love life. He’d ask me inappropriate questions about my sexual orientation. He made comments about customers bodies, told me what he’d like to do with them, and asked me if I found them attractive. If he said something about my body or asked an inappropriate question, I would change the subject or walk away, but he would keep going on. I stopped wearing makeup and wore baggy clothes to deter these comments but it didn’t work. It all started after he paid for my dogs vet bills. I was afraid to stand up to him because I owed him money. He knew this. I was afraid to quit because I fell in love with the dogs there and I was afraid no one would believe me if I told them what was going on. He’s involved in a lot of progressive activism, and he seems like a really good guy to people who aren’t close to him. He would never say anything inappropriate to me in front of other employees or customers. Then I found out it was happening to other women that worked there and at least one other woman that used to work there, so I decided it was time to leave. At first I told him I had to quit because I was going back to school, but things kept escalating so I ended up standing up for myself. I told him he said things that made me uncomfortable and he replied “ oh what, you think I’m hitting on you?” I told him that’s not what I would call it, and then he told me I was fired because I was stressing him out. So he sexually harassed me for over a year, then when I finally stood up for myself he fired me.

Planet Pooch is very understaffed and the turnover is almost 100%. New staff are frequently let go within their first few weeks, and many quit within their first few months. The negative reviews of Planet Pooch go back years and there are a lot of similarities between them. Dan hasn’t changed in the 20+ of the business and he never will. I put up with it for far too long because I love the dogs, but I wasn’t willing to put up with the bullying, lying and abuse any longer. As stated in other reviews by former staff and clients, Dan is verbally abusive and passive aggressive. He is unable to take responsibility and blames mistakes on everyone else. He very rarely gives positive feedback, most of it is negative. I can count on one hand the number of times in the year and a half I was there that he told me I did a good job on something. When he gives negative feedback, he gets hostile, makes it personal, and doesn’t give the person a chance to talk or explain . He has no problem calling people off the clock to let them know when they’ve done something wrong, either. I was once berated by the a.m. shift lead for not responding to a text from her at 9:30pm while I was eating dinner. According to her, staff should “communicate when needed”. She texted me frequently while I was off the clock, and even once on Christmas. I don’t blame her for that, though, as it’s Dan’s job to model proper behavior among his staff. He also encourages and actively participates in talking about staff behind their back. I know that he was talking about me with other staff, yet he never told me what I had done to make him so angry with me so I didn’t have the chance to fix it. I did text him a few weeks before I left and told him “If I’m doing something wrong please tell me. Don’t wait a year and a half to tell me I’m doing something wrong. I want to do well and I want to learn but I’m not a mind reader so you need to tell me what you need me to do”. He never responded. From my first day there I was not given the tools to succeed. I was trained by another staff member, not Dan, and I was only trained on the basics. I was told how to time out dogs, how to let dogs out of a room and how to break up a fight. But most of my training was done through online training modules and videos. There was a lot I was never trained on (ex: I was never told how to use pull tabs or how to prepare a room, I had to figure those out on my own). When I started, I wasn’t told to go back into a room to time out barking dogs while letting dogs out at pick-up. I had been there three months before Dan explained it to me. The staff person who trained me also told me to never time out Dan’s dogs, which I found later to not be true. Even though the job description states that no experience is needed, there is a major expectation that staff are supposed to be mind readers and know information that they aren’t given. Dan expects every staff member to have the same level of knowledge about policies and dog handling as he does, even though he’s owned the business for over 20 years. Several times I wasn’t told when policies changed (ex: I wasn’t told when a price increase happened or when vaccine requirements were changed) so I was giving out wrong information to clients then berated for doing so. Dan isn’t the kind of boss you can go to with questions. One time, a customer called with a question that I didn’t know the answer to so I asked Dan. He said that I should already know the answer and that I should go back and reread the new employee handbook. After berating me for several minutes, he finally gave me the answer. I also reread the handbook and the answer wasn’t in there. Dan is notorious for getting angry at staff for not doing things that he never told them to do. That happened to several staff while I was there. I did a lot of administrative work as well and most of it I wasn’t shown how to do and had to figure out for myself. One night as I was leaving, he stopped me and was absolutely furious that I hadn’t been texting the owners dropping off their dogs the next day for boarding. This wasn’t something he had ever asked me to do. He went off on me for several minutes about how he shouldn’t have to do my job, and he didn’t give me a chance to talk. Finally, he stopped berating me and I said that I didn’t know he want me to do that but I would going forward. I’m still baffled how I was supposed to know to do that when he never told me. I’m also worried about the safety of the dogs. Twice while I was there, dogs got soaked due to neglect. The first time, a dog fell into a garbage can that had partially filled with water after it rained. I don’t know how long he was in there, but by the time I found him he was soaked and shivering. I pulled him out, towel-dried him off, and put him under a heater in one of the rooms. The second time, Dan left a dog out in the rain all night. Both times, he told staff not to dry them off. Another time, a fight broke out between two dogs when a staff person was moving dogs between rooms. I stepped in and broke it up. There was quite a bit of blood on one of the dogs and yet Dan berated me for checking him out instead of continuing to move the dogs. One of the staff told me once while laughing that one of the dogs is so scared of her “it’s not even funny”. To be so proud that a dog is scared of you is very disturbing. Dan also left several ticks on his dogs for a few weeks, and if he’s not taking care of his own dogs I worry about the other dogs in his care.