By Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/17/23 – If you’re a responsible dog owner who works long hours and/or has an unpredictable schedule, leaving your fluffy, four-legged friend at home can be a bit of a challenge.
This is why Whitaker Dog Day Camp is a fantastic solution–your dog gets to have fun with other friends and will be thrilled to have the playtime. Getting exercise and interaction is so much better than being home alone for long stretches of time.
One of the most unique facilities in Los Angeles is Whitaker Dog Day Camp, Hollywood Times talked to the owner, Ethan Whitaker, about his caring dog venue.
Q. Why is Whitaker such a great place for doggy day camp and boarding?
It’s not just about the place, it’s about the experience our customer gets to have by using our day camp. The fact that we are exclusively pickup and drop off has enabled us to create more efficiency for our dog owners. We can be more convenient and flexible to our clients.
And because our facility has been successfully able to combine logistics and efficiency with awesome dog day camp services, that’s allowed us to better serve the client and overall, be more valuable for our community. We’re here to make life easier for our customers. We want them to have an amazing full life while still having dogs!
Q. You get lots of dogs who are large breeds.
Yes, we have many clients that own dogs which have more energy needs. We are there to take care of that, so that our customers can actually fully maximize their schedules and remove various layers of stress and guilt they may be experiencing. There’s no more pressure for them to go to a dog park anymore. We are able to take care of that socialization and look forwarding to nurturing each dog that comes to our facility.
Q. Describe your indoor/outdoor facility.
We have many comfortable platform beds for our dogs that are cleanable and sanitized throughout the entire facility at all times. Dogs have access to them the entire time they are with us. We didn’t save any expense on investing in the venue. If you go to most facilities, you’ll see that they have either AstroTurf or some type of rubberized flooring. There’s a lot of flaws with that.
A lot of the AstroTurf that people use is just random stuff they may find. That is not what we did at all. My main goal was to be able to sanitize and fully clean this entire facility, because I wanted to create a stress-free work environment for our employees. We need to have extremely high cleaning standards. It needs to smell good on a daily basis and not smell like what most dog day camps smell like.
We have 4,000 square feet of outdoor space and 2,700 square feet of indoor air-conditioned space. This is just built for dogs, primarily most dogs are outside. We’ve just created a great place for our employees and our dog clients to love and have fun; we have a misting system outside and a fully air conditioned inside and it’s just built.
We have a great venue for dogs to be themselves and to socialize and a nice safe place for them to spend time at, while their owners are being productive.
Q. What sets you apart from other dog day camps and boarding places?
Because we are a growing business, we’re attracting a lot of awesome people to join our team. During these times, I get to have awesome interviews with trainers, groomers trying to join the staff, marketing professionals trying to join the team. They get to come see the facility while it’s fully active, while we have 65 to 95 dogs at the Frogtown location and what they say every single time anyone comes to our facility, is they’re amazed.
They’re like, ‘you have 75 dogs here. It doesn’t feel like that. Now why is that?!’ It really is different, because our standards of how dogs are supposed to behave is higher. We are not co-signing any of the negative behaviors that you see dogs exhibit at dog parks and places like that.
We’re creating socialization structures for dogs to find their place in. And for the dogs that cannot get out of their energy/puppy adrenaline, they do get to have those breaks. Because at the end of the day, what we focus on is creating a venue.
Our facility is for all shapes and sizes and breeds; they can have a great epic place to socialize, have fun, rest, relax, or whatever it is they need to do.
And for the dogs that have slower or older energy, we can absolutely accommodate them too; we don’t want them to get sucked into the puppy party. And for the puppies that want to party in a certain way that may be not good for the group, we would like for them to have a space too, so they can burn off that energy, so we can relieve the stressors of our owner by the time that they get home.
That is one thing that drastically sets us apart, is our standard on how dogs are supposed to behave and not reinforcing any negative behaviors while they are at our facility.
