Dog Day Afternoons

Dog owners beware! At first, DDA seemed great– the staff was friendly and seemed knowledgeable about dog care. Our dog came home well-​exercised and happy. However, we sent her there for approximately a year, and in that time she was seriously injured twice. The first time they told us that she had cut her side open while chasing along the chain-​link fence. Nora, one of the owners, handled this first accident well; she took our dog to our vet and paid the cost of the surgery required to insert a drain and stitch up the cut. With her permission, we inspected the fence and found one spot that looked sharp. She promised us this would be fixed, and the next time we checked, it seemed to be ok. We decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. We know that accidents can happen once, and because Nora had handled the whole thing well and our dog liked going there, we decided to send her back. Less than four months later, I received a call from another staff member stating that the exact same injury had occurred again, although she wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. It was upsetting to us that they could not tell us exactly how our dog had gotten hurt. Meanwhile, Nora was on the way to the vet with our dog. When I spoke with Nora, she said she was at Angell (a great place, but not our vet) because she had called our vet and it was all booked. I called our vet to confirm this, and they said that no one had called to get an appt. for our dog, or any dog needing stitches for that matter. When I asked Nora a second time if she had called the correct vet, she again lied about being turned away. After this second experience in which Nora was barely apologetic and lied, we had no choice but to remove our dog from DDA. We have been doing research and have since heard from others that DDA has had numerous incidents of negligence– other dogs with deep cuts, a dog stolen while in their care, and other issues/​injuries. We decided to post because we do not want any other dogs/​dog owners to experience what we went through. We do not recommend this business to anyone.