Should You Leave Your Pet in a Kennel? Pros & Cons Explained

As pet parents, you always strive to provide the best care for your furry companions, and choosing a pet kennel is one way to ensure their safety when you’re away. You do everything possible to protect them and keep them happy, giving them the best of all things. However, while you may wish to take your pet everywhere with you, it’s not always logistically feasible. Factors like cost and comfort also play a role in such decisions. This is why, during vacations or when your home is too crowded with guests who may not be comfortable around pets, you might consider leaving them in a kennel.

Leaving your pet somewhere else while you are on a vacation can be among some of the most hard decisions you have to make in your life. It can be a worrisome experience for you and quite a cumbersome experience for your pet to go through. Traditionally, pet boarding is taken care of by kennels – a place where you leave your pet while you are away. Kennels typically function like lodges for animals so your pet will not be the only one that stays there. 

There are a few reasons why pet kennel are not the best decision you can make for your pet: 

1. Unknown environment – This might be the most obvious point when it comes to kennels – the place you leave them in is not known to you, the people you leave them with might not be certified to take care of your pet(s). These factors cannot be neglected.
2. Stress and Anxiety – Your pet might experience severe anxiety and stress when you leave them in kennels, because not only are they separated from you, they are also introduced to a place with several other pets which might overstimulate them and cause too much stress. Some kennels might be too loud as not all animals are trained and not all of them can be controlled.
3. Potentially unclean environment – Kennels cannot promise you a good, clean environment. They take in a number of pets and this might make the kennels dirty and hard to clean. If your pets are used to your clean, home environment, this might come as a shock to them. 
4. Overcrowding – Sometimes, kennels are focussed on making profits. Which is why they might take in more pets than they should. This causes two main issues – they cannot handle your pets properly and they cannot give them the care they deserve (and promised).
5. Infections and diseases – Your pet can be in the healthiest conditions but you cannot say that about every pet that is boarded in the kennels. Not only that, the unclean environment of the kennels itself might cause some infections to occur. Kennel cough, intestinal parasites, canine distemper, external parasites (ticks, fleas etc) and canine influenza are just some of the few diseases that can occur when you leave your pets in kennels.
6. No individual attention – This again, can be considered an obvious outcome of leaving your pet in kennels. The staff cannot afford to give individual attention to your pet nor do they have time to understand your pet’s behavior and cater to it accordingly. This might leave your pet sad, uncomfortable and experiencing a lot of stress. 

So, what can you do about it? Where can you leave your pet? You can choose pet sitting and pet boarding as an option as this will ensure a clean environment, a responsible caretaker and individual attention to your pets. For this purpose, if you choose PawSpace’s pet boarding and pet sitting services, you get access to 24×7 assistance, constant updates from the certified pet sitters taking care of your pet and worry-free time away from your pet baby.