About

The Kennel Guide lists the people who look after other people’s animals: dog groomers, boarding facilities, daycare, dog walkers, pet sitters, trainers and the odd cat boarding place. The US edition starts with twelve metro areas, from New York and Chicago to Phoenix, Austin and Seattle, and the suburbs around them.

Most of the businesses here are small. A groomer working out of a mobile van, a walker with six regulars in the same few blocks, a family running boarding on a few acres outside town. They rarely make the first page of Google, where the results tend to belong to booking apps that take a cut of every job. Each listing shows what the business itself has made public, and you contact them directly. We take nothing from the booking.

Where the listings come from

We built the first version from public business listings, then sorted them by state, city and service. Nobody paid to be included, and most of the businesses don’t know they’re here yet. Details go stale: a phone number changes, a daycare moves across town. If you spot an error, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Walkers and sitters usually work from home, so for those we show the city and ZIP code only, never a street address.

Licenses and insurance

There’s no national license for boarding or daycare. Some states require one (Colorado licenses boarding and daycare facilities through its Pet Animal Care Facilities Act program, for example), some leave it to the city or county, and some don’t regulate it at all. Ask the business what applies where they are, and whether they’ve been inspected. A good one will answer without hedging.

For grooming, walking and training, ask about liability insurance, how many dogs they handle at once, and whether anyone on staff holds a pet first aid or CPR certificate.

Who runs it

The Kennel Guide is published by OmniLearnConsultingCommerce LLC. Corrections, removals and everything else go to hello@thekennelguide.com. There’s also a UK edition covering England.