CAUTION! TAILS WAGGIN'!
01/20/2025
ANNOUNCEMENT
Dear Valued Clients and Friends of Pet Camp,
It is with a mix of emotions that I share an important development and upcoming milestone with you. After nearly 30 incredible years of providing dog boarding, daycare and training at the same location, I have made the difficult decision to close our boarding and daycare service side of the business. This change will take effect March 1st, 2025.
Pet Camp has been a labor of love since we opened our doors in 1998. Over the decades, I have been blessed to share in your journeys as pet parents, celebrating milestones and building lasting bonds with your dogs and with you. Your trust and loyalty have been the foundation of everything we’ve accomplished. For that, I am deeply grateful.
This decision was not made lightly, as I know how much these services mean to many of you and your beloved furry family members. However, as Pet Camp moves forward, I feel it is time to focus my energy and passion on growing other areas of the business, as I’m not getting any younger.
I am looking forward to share my dog training knowledge with all that are seeking by creating FREE on-line training content that will be available to all people (aiming for video releases starting next year, if not sooner), as my most passionate mission has always been to teach people to train their dogs easily and effectively through understanding and with kindness rather than by using intimidation and fear based methods, which are unfortunately still the most common methods used by trainers across the globe.
I would also like to offer more training classes to you, but it has been extremely difficult to find any teachers here in Saint Augustine that are skilled, experienced and available (especially in the area of dog sports) and whose training philosophy are aligned with ours. I’ve been running employment ads to find dog sport instructors on professional job search sites continuously for the last couple of years and 99.9% of applicants have zero experience. I am tired.
On a very positive note, long-time student and successful dog sport competitor Deborah McCarley has stepped up and will be teaching some of our Dog Agility Classes starting next month. I am excited and grateful as this will be a huge help! How-ever she is very busy, as she also works as Criminal Law Professor at our Community College AND as “The Dog Friendly” realtor at Iron Valley Real Estate of North Florida. She travels quite a bit throughout the year to compete in various dog sport venues with her Mini Aussies and her availability is unfortunately very limited.
As many of you know, we have built a 50’ Dock Diving Super-Pool, (with crystal clear water!!!). Many of you are wondering why we are still not fully open….We are having to go in and fix shoddy work done by hired contractors, which has caused terribly frustrating delays, so please pe patient…We look forward to fully opening Pet Camp’s state of the art training areas to our club members soon, which will include unlimited use of the pool, dog agility/frisbee field and a fenced in, astro-turfed dog playground. If you are interested in becoming a member, you can enquire by visiting our website www.mypetcamp.com.
I hope you will be understanding of this big change of path, and I hope that you will quickly find a similar place to bring your dogs for Playcare and for boarding. This transition will be a heart-wrenching one, but I feel it is necessary. I love you with all of my heart and look forward to sharing Pet Camp’s next chapter with you!
Love you bunches, Silke Royer.
