Owners Should Not Manage - Play Group Leader Downtown Dogs Employee Review

Downtown Dogs treated their young and capable employees like unintelligent children. The owners, Kelly and Mark, would likely hire toddlers if it were legal to keep them working on minimum wage. The lack of regard to employee and dog safety was abhorrent. One teenager would be left to manage 50+ large dogs alone. This is far from what is advertised to clients. The push for money from regularly attending dogs was so strong that non-social dogs (who would regularly draw blood on other dogs and employees) would be allowed to join daycare and have to be rotated on 5, 10, or 15-minute timers with several other dogs that they have had issues with. These dogs would still be allowed out in the group for daycare, because that is what the clients paid for. Money over the safety of the animals and humans. During training, they teach you to scream as loud as you can so someone at the front desk or in the small dog room might hear and be able to assist during a dog fight. You are taught to interfere with your body and given no tools to keep yourself safe. Employees are allowed to pick the play group rooms to work in based on seniority, leaving unequipped but "graduated" new hires in a room full of difficult to manage large dogs. The company owners fired two employees after speaking out after they had been bitten and required medical attention, when refusing to work with a certain dog that attended regularly. This was the same dog, two different employees. This dog was only "fired" after seriously injuring another dog that attended regularly. The owners were found to have not been paying their employees their overtime hours, nor their lunch time required to be spent on premises. Each employee received several thousand in missed wages. Before this issue had been brought to the owners by a legal professional, all questions regarding potential missed wages were met with denial and threats to job stability.