There are certain phone calls you don’t really want to get as a dog owner.
“Hi. Your dog tried to bite another dog.”
Yeah.
That’s one of them.
Especially when you dropped said dog off approximately five minutes ago.
But before we get to the story of Zeus getting himself officially kicked out of doggy daycare, you need to understand something.
Zeus used to LOVE daycare.
Which is part of what made the whole thing so surprising.
We’ve Always Been Doggy Daycare People
Doggy daycare wasn’t new to us when we got Zeus.
We used it fairly regularly with our Husky. We didn’t take her every day, but we’d send her a couple of times a month to keep her entertained and active while we were working.
She even had a doggy best friend there.
She’d spend the day playing with her friend, come home completely exhausted and basically be useless for the rest of the evening.
It was wonderful.
So when we got Zeus, putting him in daycare seemed like an obvious choice.
He was a puppy, he was initially spending more time alone during the day, and we had kids’ sports that sometimes kept us out late into the evening.
On those days especially, daycare seemed perfect.
Zeus could spend the day playing instead of sitting at home waiting for us.
And we’d come home to a tired puppy.
Win-win.
Puppy Zeus LOVED It
We started taking Zeus about two days a week.
Like most daycares, they had him go through a trial period first to make sure he could handle being around the other dogs.
He passed with flying colors.
In fact, he moved pretty quickly from the small-dog room into the big-dog room.
Because apparently even as a puppy, Zeus looked at the small dogs and thought:
These people aren’t hitting hard enough.
He liked to play rough.
The bigger dogs were more his speed.
And he had a GREAT time.
At that point, I never would have imagined we’d eventually get a phone call telling us he wasn’t allowed to come back.
And daycare stopped.
Life Changed
Once Zeus recovered from his broken leg, things at home looked completely different.
By then, we had Electra.
We were naturally home more, and Zeus wasn’t the puppy sitting alone during the day anymore.
A sister he could wrestle with approximately 900 times a day.
So daycare just sort of became a thing of the past.
Eventually, I also started taking Zeus and Electra to work with me more often.
At that point, there really wasn’t much reason to use daycare.
They had each other.
They were coming to work.
They were getting walks.
Everything was fine.
Until we planned a two-week trip to Europe.
We Needed Boarding
The daycare Zeus used to attend also offered boarding, which seemed perfect.
Our plan was to have Zeus and Electra spend the first week there and then have our trainer pick them up for the second week.
They’d spend that week in her home, working on some of their behaviors and attitudes while we were gone.
Honestly, it sounded like a pretty great setup.
Before the trip, though, both dogs needed to go through the daycare trial process again because it had been so long since Zeus had been there.
And Electra had never been.
Electra was naturally a little timid at first.
New place.
New dogs.
New people.
But once she figured out that this building was apparently filled with potential new best friends?
She was thrilled.
Because that’s Electra.
Electra would live inside your skin if you let her.
Zeus was different.
Zeus Wasn’t the Same Daycare Dog Anymore
It was obvious pretty quickly that Zeus wasn’t nearly as excited about daycare as he’d been when he was younger.
He did okay.
He passed the trial.
But he definitely wasn’t thrilled about all the other dogs—especially when they were around Electra.
Still, we did a couple of daycare days leading up to our trip to help both dogs get reacquainted with everything.
And every report was basically the same:
Electra is doing great.
And…
Zeus is struggling a little.
He needed more breaks and more time-outs.
I specifically asked whether they thought daycare wasn’t a good fit for him anymore.
They remembered Zeus from when he was younger and felt like he probably just needed some time to adjust.
Okay.
Fair enough.
So off to Europe we went.
And They Survived Boarding
Our trainer picked them up for the second week of our trip.
When I talked to her, she said they were fine.
No major issues.
Zeus had definitely seemed more stressed by the daycare environment than Electra, who apparently thought we’d sent her to summer camp.
But once Zeus was in our trainer’s home?
He was fine.
She had other dogs there.
He played with them.
No major aggression.
No disasters.
Everything seemed normal.
We came home from Europe and went back to regular life.
About a week later, work got busy.
And I thought:
Why don’t I just take them to daycare for the day?
They can play.
I can work.
Everyone wins.
Narrator:
Everyone did not win.
The Phone Call
I dropped Zeus and Electra off and drove to work.
My office is about five minutes away.
I had barely gotten there when my phone rang.
Daycare.
Uh-oh.
They told me Zeus had tried to nip another dog.
Thankfully, Zeus’s little flat Frenchie face doesn’t exactly give him the world’s greatest equipment for successfully biting things.
But attempted aggression is still attempted aggression.
And the daycare understandably wasn’t comfortable keeping him there.
Zeus could no longer come to daycare.
Electra?
Electra was fine.
Of course she was.
So I turned around, drove the five minutes back and picked up my daycare dropout.
What the Hell Happened?
I wanted to understand what had triggered him.
Was another dog bothering Electra?
Had someone taken a toy?
Had the other dog gotten in his face?
Apparently…
No.
They told me it seemed completely unprovoked.
A smaller dog approached Zeus wanting to play.
Electra wasn’t even nearby.
And Zeus went after him.
That was hard for me to hear.
Because suddenly my brain went straight to:
Is Zeus aggressive now?
Is he becoming a problem around other dogs?
Did we do something wrong?
And honestly, I felt really discouraged.
This was the same dog who had once happily spent two days a week playing in the big-dog room.
What changed?
So I Called Our Trainer
I scheduled an emergency session with our trainer because I wanted to figure out what the hell was going on.
And she helped me look at the situation differently.
One of the biggest things she told me was incredibly simple:
Doggy daycare isn’t for every dog.
And just because Zeus didn’t do well in that environment didn’t automatically mean he was a mean dog or even a dog-aggressive dog.
He may have been scared.
He may have been stressed.
He may have been overstimulated.
And if you know Zeus…
That dog can get overstimulated.
A free-range daycare environment with a bunch of dogs running around, playing, approaching him and constantly interacting may simply have become too much for him.
Maybe puppy Zeus loved it.
Adult Zeus?
Apparently adult Zeus would like everyone to leave him alone.
And honestly?
I can relate.
Zeus Changed—and That’s Okay
Something else had changed since Zeus’s original daycare days.
He had Electra.
He had me around more.
His daily life looked completely different.
And his personality had matured.
He didn’t necessarily want or need a room full of random dogs anymore.
That’s actually pretty obvious when I look at how different Zeus and Electra are today.
Electra wants to meet everyone.
Dogs.
People.
Strangers.
Probably the mailman.
She is everyone’s best friend.
Again, if physically possible, Electra would probably crawl inside your body and live there.
Zeus?
Zeus comes to work with me and has very little interest in meeting anyone.
He doesn’t really want to greet random people on campus.
He doesn’t particularly care about meeting their dogs.
That’s his happy place.
And I’ve stopped feeling like I need to turn him into the kind of dog who wants something different.
Getting Kicked Out of Daycare Didn’t Make Zeus a Bad Dog
Initially, getting that phone call made me feel like we’d failed somehow.
My dog had been kicked out of daycare for aggression.
That’s not exactly the report card you proudly stick on the refrigerator.
But after talking with our trainer and looking at Zeus’s behavior in other environments, I realized I was treating one bad environment like it defined the entire dog.
It doesn’t.
Zeus can be around other dogs.
He plays with dogs he knows.
He did perfectly fine in our trainer’s home with her dogs.
He lives with Electra, who spends approximately half her life physically assaulting him for entertainment.
He just doesn’t enjoy being thrown into a big group of random dogs anymore.
And apparently he decided to communicate that preference in the least socially acceptable way possible.
Would I put him back into a free-range doggy daycare?
No.
He made his feelings pretty clear.
But I also don’t look at him differently because of it.
Sometimes Doggy Daycare Just Isn’t a Good Fit
I still think doggy daycare can be fantastic.
Our Husky loved it.
Puppy Zeus loved it.
Electra would probably pack her own overnight bag if she knew where we kept it.
But Zeus taught me something I hadn’t really considered before:
A dog can change.
Something they loved when they were younger may stress them out when they’re older.
And a dog not enjoying daycare doesn’t automatically mean there’s something wrong with them.
Sometimes they’re overwhelmed.
Sometimes they don’t like that style of play.
Sometimes they’d rather be somewhere quieter.
And sometimes they’d simply prefer to follow their person around all day and ignore everyone else.
Zeus has made his choice pretty clear.
So these days, instead of dropping him off in a room full of dogs, he comes to work with me.
He hangs out.
He follows me around.
He ignores most of the people and dogs who would like to meet him.
And he’s perfectly happy.
Meanwhile, Electra is still out there trying to become best friends with every living creature she encounters.
Same breed.
Same house.
Completely different dogs.
And only one of them has officially been expelled from daycare.
So far.
