Dawn Provides Pets with Tender Care

by Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
“I’m writing a book called the Personal Adventures of a Pet Sitter,” announces Dawn Fitch, owner and CEO of Dawn’s Tender Care Pet Sitting. You see Dawn all the time, walking a pooch along M-22 or making the rounds in her red truck. It’s hard at first to get the details about her business out of Dawn, because every mention of a type of animal leads to another amazing story. She has big blond hair and she marches those dogs along the roadside energetically because she’s so busy. “I care for 25 – 30 animals each day, more around holidays,” Dawn says. Dawn has as many as 146 clients in the course of a year with pets that must be fed, walked, given shots, or at least visited from 1 – 3 times per day. “I put 70,000 miles per year on my truck,” Dawn says with a smile and a shake of her head, “and last Christmas I put 695 miles on in one day!”

Being busy and covering a lot of ground is the price Dawn pays to guarantee that you get “Tender Care.” She has been trained at Pet Sitting International in North Carolina, and Dawn has also been trained in CPR-for-pets and knows how to “do medications, like for diabetic animals.” She has cared for 42 horses at once, as well as dogs, cats, bulls, a group of 12 donkeys, birds, lizards, tarantulas, chickens, and a snake. “I was watching over 12 pheasants once,” Dawn recalls, “and when the owner came back they were all dead! The first day one was dead, and I expected a cat had done it. When another was dead the second day I called the owner, who said not to worry. After the fourth was dead I stayed up, sitting in the garage, and at 3 a.m. a great horned owl appeared and slipped under the netting. When I went to attack it with a shovel, my friend who had stopped to check on me said ‘You can’t kill an owl, they’re endangered!’
Sometimes Dawn has been asked to sit for pets who are dying. During one half hour interview she conducts with all prospective clients (to go over paper work, to check that rabies and distemper shots are all up-to-date, and to discuss any special needs and sign a contract), the owner of a 16 year old poodle said “If it dies, put it in the freezer, I’ll take care of it when I get home.” Dawn reports that “many people with older dogs say that, or they instruct me to have the pet cremated in Traverse City at the veterinarian’s there. They charge about $125 per dog depending on the urn or box and the size of the dog.”
Dawn’s motivation is to see that the pets are happy and thriving. “I always wanted to be a vet, but couldn’t afford school,” Dawn explains. “I was a pet sitter for my neighbors as a kid. By the time I was 9 or 10 I was feeding my breakfast to the neighbor’s bulldog. I had dogs, a horse, and a pet raccoon.” When Dawn’s father insisted they get rid of the raccoon, they dropped it off over 30 miles from home despite Dawn’s tearful protests on their way to a family gathering in Indiana. “Seven days later I was cleaning the kennel for the black labs and explaining to them that Sally the raccoon was gone forever, when I heard a chittering and here came Sally running down the hill! When she hit 60 pounds we donated her to the Clinch Park Zoo in Traverse City.”
As a way of practicing the telling of the stories that will be in her new book, Dawn goes on to tell me more adventures of a pet sitter. There was Elliott the cockatoo, who would repeat “Here, kitty kitty!” when the cats were around to drive them nuts, or bark just like the two poodles in the house to keep them entertained. “Elliott got coffee in the morning with bird nuggets in it right on the table,” Dawn laughs, “and he could dance and poop on command. He was amazing.”
Or there’s the story about the day Dawn went to attend to two “expensive cats”. The TV was on and she hadn’t left it on the night before. “On the couch slept a long-haired, goateed man. I screamed “Who are you? How’d you get in? and Where are the cats?!’ Then I called the cops and said “He lost the $500 cat!” It turns out the man was returning home inebriated the night before and walked into the wrong house. The cleaning lady had forgotten to lock the sliding glass door. The deputies arrived and it all ended peacefully. “He wrote apologies to everyone,” Dawn says, “and went into a treatment program. The police told me I take my job way too seriously!”
Dawn’s Tender Care Pet Sitting covers a large area including Empire, Glen Arbor, Maple City, Lake Ann, Cedar, and a few cats in Traverse City. Extra distance costs more. Dawn likes to spend about half an hour with the clients and the pets to draw up a contract and to make sure the arrangement will work. She ends up going way beyond the calls of pet nature. “When people are gonna be gone for a few days I end up checking the mail, filling humidifiers, watering plants, taking out the garbage, you name it. When elderly people can no longer walk their dogs, they call me. It’s a 365 days a year job, and there’s never a dull moment. When someone must leave suddenly and a pet needs to be taken care of, call me.” It takes devotion as well as pet skill, and Dawn has plenty of both.
Got pets that need food, a walk, a shot, some fresh air, or some friendly conversation to help them get through their solitary day? Call Dawn Fitch at Dawn’s Tender Care Pet Sitting: 231-633-5217 (mobile).