Holidays? Hardly for dog trainers, boarding facilities

More than almost anyone in town, Malaika Heinbaugh feels the time crunch during this holiday season.

Heinbaugh, owner of Dog Gone Amazing Inc., is working long hours to make sure that her company's new training and boarding facility at 7100 S. Virginia St. is open in time for the end-of-year holidays.

For the folks whose work days are filled with barking and not the kind from that grouch in the corner office the holidays are generally the busiest weeks of the year.

Boarding kennels fill up as pet owners leave town to visit relatives or soak up some sun.

Training schedules, meanwhile, fill quickly as families want well-behaved puppies when guests come to visit or want to begin training that puppy under the tree as soon as possible.

"My phone calls have started already," said Michelle Metcalf of Sit Please Mobile Dog Training & House Sitting a few days ago. "A lot of people are going away for Christmas."

Already scrambling after a Living Social campaign that sold 65 coupons that are beginning to turn into calls, Metcalf said her busy schedule of house-sitting services during the holiday gets even more frenetic with the addition of calls for training services.

About half the clients who will be adding a dog to the household during December already have begun training programs to ensure a well-behaved pet during family celebrations, she said.

The other half of the clients who want a well-trained dog which often means "a well-trained owner" will be on the phone the morning after Christmas, she said.

Heinbaugh, meanwhile, said her busy season began more than a month ago, when clients began enlisting her help to shop for dogs and find a pet that would be a good fit for a household.

At the same time, she's been overseeing the conversion of a former bar on South Virginia Street into a boarding and training facility. (Heinbaugh worked with Travis Hansen of Stark & Associates Commercial Real Estate to lease the property.)

And Heinbaugh was busy interviewing candidates for the two or three staff positions she'll need to fill as soon as the boarding and training facility is ready to accept guests this month.

The pet-boarding business provides a good gauge of the pace of economic recovery, said Don Hanson, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers. (The national group has a Reno-area tie. The Impetus Agency, an advertising and public relations firm in Reno, is the association's agency of record.)

Hanson, owner of a kennel at Bangor, Maine, said boarding facilities typically get busier as consumers spend more on travel. From his conversations with kennel owners and trainers around the country, he says it appears that the pet-boarding business continues to recover slowly.

During boom times, Hanson said, he once had had every available space in his kennel for the holiday season reserved by early September.

(The recession, he said, was particularly hard on pet cats. Budget-conscious families would often find a kennel to take care of pet dogs, but leave seemingly independent pet cats to fend for themselves.)

The Christmas season is the busiest for kennel owners, he said, followed by Thanksgiving. In the Northeast, where families get desperate for some warm sun after a long winter, late February also can be a boom time.

Because their boarding facilities are typically filled during the holidays, Hanson said professionals in the pet-care business grow accustomed to working on Christmas and New Year's Day, delivering food, medication and hugs.

"It's more akin to operating a hospital than operating a hotel," he says.