Pet Sitting

Charityworker

I'm sure there must be a thread on pet sitting somewhere. Me and my 17 year old daughter are thinking of starting a small pet sitting business together (by small pets I mean hamsters, gerbils, tortoises etc). She won't be looking after any cats or dogs. She is on the first year of a 3 year animal care course and has passed all the pet care sessions so far. Eventually she would like to be a zoo keeper but I know these jobs are few and far between so she may have to make do with pet sitting. She currently has a saturday job at the local zoo cleaning out and feeding their 'non dangerous stock'.

I've already asked my landlord if we could do this from home and he has said no.

Now there is a premises up for rent in the town centre at just £43 a week. At the moment it is an office. The question is can I start renting it and just change it to a pet sitting business or will I have to get permission? The office is quite large with 2 large rooms, kitche area and toilet area. Do you think this is a viable business?

krlyr

Personally I would question how much people are willing to pay to have their hamster/gerbil/etc. looked after - it's a lot easier to rope a relative or friend into fitting a cage into their house for a week than a dog or cat. A petshop I worked at offered this service, it was cheap for them to do as the owner provided a cage and the animals just went upstairs in the shop or home with a member of staff, and even then we only charged something silly like 50p a day. You could probably get away with a little more but at £2 a day you'd need to take in 22 pets a week jus to break even on rent, let alone pay for utilities, insurance, supplies (bedding, food, etc. - or are owners supposed to provide their own?) and wages.
The first thing I would recommend doing is checking if you can get insurance that will cover illness or injury in small animals because I know the insurance policies available on small furries are limited as it is, let alone for a commercial setting. If you cannot get insurance to cover this eventuality then you will need to take deposits or have strict contracts to make sure the owner pays up. Also you may have to consider what happens if an illness or injury is your fault - as a pet owner, I wouldn't be happy to turn up to find a bill for hundreds of pounds for my rabbit because you'd taken in an ill rabbit and it had passed something on to mine, or that you'd fed something that it wasn't used to and it had caused an upset tummy or gut stasis.
Also consider what happens if the owner does not show up for the pet - on several occasions we had people book their pet in with us, used false details, and we never heard from them again. When they were paying a small deposit (something like £5) upfront, there was no financial incentive to come back for a pet they didn't want, it saved them the hassle (and embarrassment?) of going to the RSPCA and admitting that they didn't want the pet any more. Fortunatly in a petshop we had plenty of staff willing to squeeze in an extra pet, or we had a good audience to advertise the homeless pet to, but you will need to plan for this. Again, you'll need a contract to ensure that you are legally in the right to rehome the pet if it's not collected after a set period.
Not sure if you will need to apply for a change of usage in the business as it may be considered more like boarding kennels than an office?
I'm not entirely sure I'd want my pets to be looked after in a premises that was left alone overnight too - what if the office caught fire? Was broken into? If my pet injured itself when you shut up shop at 6pm and wasn't discovered until 9am the next day?
Sorry to be negative but there are so many home petsitters nowadays that you need to offer a competitive edge, and I see a seperate building as more of a con than a pro.

krlyr

Some other practical issues
- bedding, do you cater for personal preference and allergies? I personally wouldn't want any small animals of mine on woodshavings are there are studies that show softwood phenols can affect the liver and possibility contribute to liver damage. I avoid it with all of mine and use cardboard bedding instead. However, I had a rat that had to be housed on Vetbed as opposed to cardboard bedding due to bumblefoot (sores on the base of the feet) and would want a petsitter to allow for this too.

- cages, does the owner provide their own or do you have them fitted to maximise space? Do you go for tanks to prevent spread of illness, despite the lack of ventilation being a possible issue (ammonia can build up in tanks and cause respiratory issues). What size tanks do you go for, the largest possible to promote a 'luxury' stay, or smaller to maximise profits (but risk people being unhappy for their pets to be in something that small). What's going to be easiest to clean out? Wire cages can be bulky and difficult to clean the bars thoroughly, but glass tanks can be very heavy. Plastic tanks run the risk of being chewed through. If people provide their own cages, can you guarantee that you won't break them while moving them, or that you'll shut the doors properly (designs vary a lot from cage to cage and each can have very different closing mechanisms). If the pet escapes, is it your fault for not using your own secure caging, or the owner's fault for providing inadequate caging?

- food. Again, there are lots of commercial foods I wouldn't want to feed my pet. Anecdotal evidence of commercial foods with chicken contributing to mammary tumours in female rats has made me avoid many commercial brands and I fed a mix sourced online, made from straights (grains, seeds, etc) - but you pay a premium for this. Do owners provide their own food? If so, how do you make sure they have provided enough to prevent you running out and having to feed something else (and potentially cause health issues - some animals cope fine but animals like rabbits have sensitive stomachs and don't fare well with a sudden change in food). If owners are providing it, you can't really charge for food so have to lower your costs to reflect this. If you do provide food then which brands do you go for, how much do you order (remember that vitamin content starts to decrease after ~6 months), ways to prevent infestation (indian meal moths are a common problem in petshops who store lots of dry pet food).

Other factors - like in chinchillas, the scent of a female can cause a bonded pair of males to suddenly fall out. I had two groups of rabbits, one group would fight between each other if they so much as saw the other group, so I had to use physical barriers (they actually were fine with the smell/sound, it was just sight). The presence of a male animal can cause females of some species to come into heat which can cause behavioural changes. Do you limit your customers so you only ever have one pair/group of that particular species in at the same time to prevent this? Do you have spare cages if the animals were to fall out, for whatever reason, during the course of the stay? On the topic of species, bear in mind the effect that the presence of another species could have - my rats were very fearful when I first brought home some foster ferrets, because ferrets would prey on rats in the wild. They did adjust but many animals won't.

Again, sorry to be negative but I don't see petsitting to be a hugely profitable business on its own, with the overheads of a seperate building, those that I know of who do petsitting tend to invest in a shed/summerhouse to convert and stick to one or two species and offer other services, like dog walking combined with petsitting of the small furries in the house, or grooming, or run a rescue and just do petsitting to earn a little money to go towards that.
Also, in terms of the actual job your daughter would be doing, consider that petsitting isn't going to be sitting cuddling pets all day. Sounds like she is quite animal-orientated with her course but as someone who worked in various petshops - one of my roles being to come in before we opened up and cleaning out all the cages on a daily basis - the practical side of petsitting is going to revolve around cleaning cages, and a lot of them if you end up looking after a high volume of pets to make your profit margins. I love animals but cleaning cages isn't all that fun!

JayneTay

I would want someone to come to my house to look after my small pets - then I'm not transporting them anywhere - someone I know does this and it works really well. She doesn't charge much and works in a local area so she doesn't have major petrol costs. I think she comes once/twice a day.