The Uber and Lyft of Dog Walking Fight State Oversight
By: Elaine S. Povich, Stateline Article, Pew Trusts
Dogs running in the yard at a dog daycare; Wikipedia
All Connecticut state Rep. Kim Rose wanted was to make sure home-based “doggie day cares” followed the same health and safety rules as commercial kennels. It sounded deceptively simple.
But as soon as the Democrat introduced her bill in January, web-based pet care services such as Rover and Wag worked to exempt their business model from the bill. They feared that making their contractors subject to the same licensing and taxes as a commercial kennel would undermine their business.
Often referred to as the Uber and Lyft of the pet care industry, Rover and Wag contract with freelance dog walkers, pet sitters and in-home pet care workers. Those workers are linked up via the companies’ apps and sent to clients’ houses on demand. Very often, the workers keep pets in their own homes, sometimes during the day, sometimes overnight.
The gig-economy model for pet care has disrupted a standing industry in somewhat the same way that ride-hailing services upended the taxi industry. And just like in those cases, cities and states are scrambling to make their regulations fit.
In addition to Connecticut, many other states and cities, including Colorado, Massachusetts and California, are grappling with overseeing the pet care platforms, whether by implementing new statutes or considering legislation that specifically addresses how they do business.
Yet Rover and Wag have successfully fended off regulations in state after state in recent years, earning exemptions that relieve their gig workers from the oversight required of kennels and pet care professionals.
As a result, millions of pets are being walked, boarded and cared for by people with no formal training or licensing, whom consumers often don’t know personally and whose homes haven’t been inspected. Traditional kennels say the exemptions aren’t fair and put animals at risk.
But critics of more regulation say the lax oversight makes sense for gig pet sitters, calling some state lawmakers’ efforts to license dog walkers government overreach and pointing out that unlicensed babysitters routinely care for children.
"Rover hired a bunch of high-paid lobbyists. They sent out emails to their customers saying we were trying to shut down the biz entirely." Kim Rose (D), state representative CONNECTICUT
The app-based model works well for on-call pet sitters, like college students picking up a little extra cash, but it threatens professional pet care operations, said Erin Hatton, a sociology professor at the University of Buffalo who has studied the gig economy.
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