What are dog daycare red flags?

No evaluation is the first. A daycare that will take your dog on day one without first watching it with other dogs has no basis for placing it, and no way to keep a dog that should not be in a group away from yours. At Dogtown every dog completes a free evaluation, a temperament test followed by a few supervised hours in a group, before daycare, Dogtown Academy, overnight stays or walks.

No grouping by size is the second: a Chihuahua and a Great Dane can both be friendly and still be a dangerous pair. No injury protocol is the third. Dogs play with their mouths and bodies, scrapes happen in any group, and a daycare should be able to tell you without hesitating who looks at a hurt dog, how you are told and what gets written down. The fourth is a kennel license nobody can show you.

Some warnings are quieter but add up. A daycare that answers 'plenty' when you ask how many dogs one person watches has either not counted or would rather you did not. One that never asks for vaccine records is admitting dogs it knows nothing about; Dogtown asks for Rabies, DHPP and Bordetella on file and a current city dog license, checked at the evaluation. And a room too full to cross without stepping over dogs is too full for anyone to see what is happening in it.

Your nose and ears count as evidence. A strong smell of urine, or of a cleaner used to cover it, suggests cleaning is behind the dogs. Sustained, high-pitched barking from one room with nobody moving toward it suggests nobody is reading that group. None of these proves a daycare is unsafe on its own. Three of them together are a good reason to keep looking, whatever the price or the convenience.

Ollie's Law makes injuries a matter of record. Commercial boarding and training kennels, which include daycares, must report injuries to animals or people on their premises to the licensing authority, and the department or the licensing authority investigates every report. Where an investigation leads to enforcement, the department posts the investigative report on its website. A daycare that seems unaware of this is a daycare that has not kept up.

Ask how an injury is handled before you need to know. A complete answer covers who examines the dog, how quickly and by what means you are contacted, which veterinarian is used and what is written down. The MSPCA puts the core question bluntly: who is responsible for seeking medical attention for your pet, and where will it be taken? Ask us to walk you through how Dogtown handles it; for after-hours emergencies, Massachusetts Veterinary Referral Hospital in Woburn is open 24 hours.