E2: The instructions we leave for our pet sitters

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

Bruce had nine steps for Judge. Most of them were about possession aggression: don't leave bags unzipped on the couch, don't leave anything at dog height, have something he really wants ready if he gets hold of something he shouldn't. The pet sitter read them as a warning. What Bruce had written was everything he had learned about the situations where Judge's instincts run ahead of his judgement. Ben worked in dog daycare in Toronto and picked up a dog called Justice by throwing a towel over her before scooping her up, because otherwise she would bite. Once out of the apartment, she was social, relaxed, and sat on his lap the entire ride. Makenzie has spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and a dog walker in London who needed none of it.

In all three households, the notes are trying to do something a list cannot.

This is a conversation about what those notes are actually for.

I have spreadsheets for Makenzie, colour-coded by situation, more detail than any dog walker has ever asked for. None of it explained what actually worked. What worked was Kasha, our walker in London, who never read a single page and whose only instruction was her own calm, steady presence. Makenzie followed her within minutes, no negotiation asked for or given, the same dog who reads every other stranger's intentions in half a second and rarely gives an inch.

The conversation moves through what it looks like when a dog appears fine at drop-off and cannot rest once there, the daycare that did everything right and still cost Makenzie more in a day than she could recover from. Through what stress research says about dogs who look like they're coping and are not, and what changes in a nervous system when the one person it trusts most is gone. Through the sitters who read a room without a single instruction, and the ones who had every step written down and still missed what the dog needed.

The longer the notes get, the more they are trying to hand over the relationship itself.