E2: The instructions we leave for our pet sitters

Listen to episode 2. Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.

We sit down to write instructions for a pet sitter. It usually begins with practical things: food, walks, routines and where everything is.

And for a moment, it feels manageable. As if care can be organised, listed, handed over. But after a few lines, something begins to shift. The sentences start sounding different. “Give her a moment when you arrive.” “She prefers to approach first.” “He might ignore you at the beginning.” At some point, the list stops being about tasks. It starts trying to explain a dog.

In this episode of the Pawplexity Pawdcast, we stay with that shift. What begins as logistics often becomes something more complex — an attempt to translate a relationship into a set of instructions, and to make leaving feel more possible in the process.

We talk about what happens when care is transferred, and what cannot be transferred with it. About the tension between preparation and control. About the assumptions we carry into situations like pet sitting and daycare. And about how easily observable behaviour can give the impression that everything is working, even when something underneath is less settled.

We move through different ways of looking at  attachment, regulation, and stress — not as answers, but as ways of noticing more. Dogs do not experience situations only through what happens around them, but through how those situations feel in the absence of the person they orient to. And some of what matters most — timing, attunement, the reading of subtle signals — does not translate easily into written form.

A list can describe actions. It cannot recreate the way those actions are timed, softened, or adjusted in the moment. Which means the document often carries more than information. It carries an attempt to preserve something relational. We stay with a quieter distinction: the difference between what can be described and what is actually understood.

A list can outline feeding times and walking routes. It can anticipate scenarios, prevent mistakes, create structure. But understanding rarely fits neatly into a document. This is not an episode about writing better instructions. It is a conversation about what those instructions are trying to hold in place. About the gap between presence and substitution. And about the limits of what can be passed on when presence itself is part of the care.

What, if anything, have you tried to put into words about your dog that never quite translated?

If you would rather sit with this on the page than in your ears, the companion essay is “What pet sitter notes are really for”.

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