Welcome to the dog delays of summer.
Pet parents hoping to take their dog to the pet salon or for a visit to the veterinarian are finding that extremely long wait times are pushing appointments back to August or later.
An increase in dog adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic is colliding with the normal crush of seasonal clients and a shortage of groomers, vets and vet techs.
As a result, groomers are working six or seven days a week to keep up with demand.
“Before COVID, people could get an appointment within a couple weeks,” said Andrew Sawler, a veteran groomer with Complete Canine along Route 12A in Plainfield. “Now we’re talking six weeks, triple the normal wait time.”
Sawler said he’s not getting much of a chance to put down his clippers this summer.
“Sundays are my day off, but I’m often in doing a dog or two,” he said.
The demand for veterinarian services has led Veremedy Pet Hospital in White River Junction and Woodstock to suspend taking new clients “indefinitely,” said Dr. Gina Roberts, a veterinarian at Veremedy.
“It’s a problem not just in the Upper Valley, but nationally,” Roberts said of staffing issues. Veremedy lost two vets who wanted to go into specialized practice, a vet tech who is going to veterinary school and “a few who are on maternity leave.”
Roberts, who said the influx of people who have moved to the Upper Valley, many of them with pets, increased the need for vet services, which Veremedy tried accommodating for a while until it taxed staff too much.
“We just got to the point where we realized we can’t continue to provide the level of care clients expect and deserve because we just don’t have the staffing to do that,” Roberts said.
Some boarding kennels are saying there’s no room at the inn, too.
K-9 Kidz Daycare & Boarding in North Hartland has all 60 slots for day care filled, and overnight boarding is fully booked through September, said owner Christina Sweeney.
That’s a stark difference from when the pandemic began 15 months ago and Sweeney said business dropped by half, particularly among clients who did not board their dogs while they remained at home.
“Basically everyone was home during COVID and got a puppy,” Sweeney said. “Now that people are going back to work, they need day care because they are not at home.”
Just how intense was the demand for “COVID puppies” is evidenced by what Christiane Dionne, president of Wags & Wiggles Dog Rescue in Newport, experienced whenever she posted her nonprofit had a rescue dog available for adoption.
“We’d put a puppy up for adoption and within half an hour we’d get 100 applications,” Dionee said, compared to 25 to 30 applications Wags & Wiggles typically received before the pandemic.
Dionne has room for only 10 adoptees at any one time, and because demand so far outstrips supply, she has suspended accepting new applications from would-be pet owners.
“I’m not taking new clients anymore,” she said. “I’m booked out so far, it doesn’t make sense.”
The uptick in adoptions is confirmed by the New Hampshire Humane Society, a busy shelter in the Lakes Region, according to Executive Director Charles Stanton.
“We did see an increase in adoption interests in mid-2020 as the state began enforcing necessary health regulations and quarantines,” Stanton said via email.
He said adoptions “spiked during the middle months” of 2020 and subsequently have leveled off, although despite being open by appointment only for several months they still placed as many pets as when they were open full-time in previous years.
Curt Jacques, owner of West Lebanon Feed & Supply and Clean Paws Grooming, speculated that the preponderance of pet owners in the Upper Valley is higher than Twin State averages. His guesstimate is about 22,000 pet owners within 30 minutes of his West Lebanon store. (The combined population of Hanover, Lebanon and Hartford is about 33,000.)
Scheduling for new customers “has always been a problem,” Jacques said, but he expects the current wait time is “at least three to four months out.”
One major issue has been finding qualified groomers and bathers, which, as with workers across many industries, have been difficult to find both during and emerging from the pandemic.
“I have one full-time groomer and one part-time groomer, and if you want the senior full-time groomer it would be the end of July before you can get in,” said Carolyn Tourville, owner of Willow Farm Pet Services in North Springfield, Vt. “It’s hard to find groomers, especially good groomers. It’s a hard job. It’s messy.”
Doreen Strew, with Perfect Fur Salon in Quechee, said the waitlist for a non-regular client has 60 people on it, and she’s working six days a week with the earliest available booking at the end of August.
She said she needs more groomers and bathers, but the hard work turns off a lot of young people.
“It’s not just cuddling dogs all day,” said Strew, who said that between her 50% commission and tips, “it’s a good paycheck.”
And then there are the benefits that most other lines of work can’t boast.
“If you love dogs and want to be in an animal setting all day, it’s hard to beat being a groomer,” she said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.