The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘My Goldendoodle Spent a Week at Some Luxury Dog ‘Hotels.’ I Tagged Along.’

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

By the time Sam Apple pulled up with his goldendoodle, Steve, to their resting place, he was tired from the long drive and already second-guessing his plan. He felt a little better when they stepped inside the Dogwood Acres Pet Retreat. The lobby, with its elegant tiled entrance, might have passed for the lobby of any small countryside hotel, at least one that strongly favored dog-themed decor. But this illusion was broken when the receptionist reviewed their reservation — which, in addition to their luxury suite, included cuddle time, group play, a nature walk and a “belly rub tuck-in.”Venues like this one, on Kent Island in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, didn’t exist when Apple was growing up in the 1980s. If you needed a place to board your dog back then, you went to a kennel, where your dog spent virtually the entire day in a small — and probably not very clean — cage. There were no tuck-ins, no bedtime stories, no dog-bone-shaped swimming pools. There was certainly nothing like today’s most upscale canine resorts, where the dogs sleep on queen-size beds and the spa offerings include mud baths and blueberry facials; one pet-hotel franchise on the West Coast will even pick up your dog in a Lamborghini. Apple knew Dogwood Acres wouldn’t be quite as luxurious as that, but the accommodations still sounded pretty nice. So he decided to check his dog in, and to tag along for the journey.

Hey, I'm Sam Apple. I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the owner of a very good golden doodle named Steve who loves neck massages and hard-boiled eggs. I've had this feeling for a while now that the dogs are taking over all these activities where you never see dogs in the past now you're seeing people bring them everywhere they go

restaurants have dog tasting menus there are ice cream parlors specifically for dogs we dress them up in Halloween costumes which a decade ago might have been a joke. Now it's like, of course you buy your dog a Halloween costume. Who wouldn't do that? Recently, I became obsessed with this concept of luxury dog hotels. Not pet-friendly accommodations for people, but upscale dog kennels, essentially, that are nicer than some human hotels.

There are these high-end resorts with names like Chateau Pucci and Barkingham Pet Hotel, where your dog can luxuriate while you're off on vacation. Hotel staff will take your dog on nature walks, read them bedtime stories, and perform belly rub tuck-ins. The amenities some of these places offer are pretty astounding. Queen-size beds, big flat-screen TVs, swimming pools, and they're often filled with chic decor. The most lavish dog hotels include spas where your dog can get a blueberry facial, a mud bath, or a massage. According to one franchise's website, relaxing down-tempo slash chill music emanates throughout the entire hotel, creating a peaceful vibe for the canine guests. The same franchise

will pick your dog up in a Lamborghini or other sports car of your choice. Why is it so different from the way we grew up? I decided to go on a road trip with Steve so that we could try out some of these dog hotels ourselves. I packed the car with Steve's stuffed mallard, one of his favorite toys, a big bag of hard-boiled eggs, and a sleeping bag. The result is this week's Sunday read,

read by Eric Jason Martin. Our audio producer for this episode is Adrian Hurst. The original music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. By the time my golden doodle, Steve, and I pulled up to our resting place, I was tired from the long drive and already second-guessing my plan. I felt a little better when we stepped inside the Dogwood Acres Pet Retreat. The lobby, with its elegant tiled entrance, might have passed for the lobby of any small countryside hotel, at least one that strongly favored dog-themed decor. But this illusion was

broken when the receptionist reviewed our reservation, which, in addition to our luxury suite, included cuddle time, group play, a nature walk, and a belly rub tuck-in. Venues like this one, located on Kent Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, didn't exist when I was growing up in the 1980s. If you needed a place to board your dog back then, you went to a kennel where your dog spent virtually the entire day in a small, and probably not very clean, cage. There were no tuck-ins, no bedtime stories, no dog-bone-shaped swimming pools. There were certainly nothing like today's most upscale canine resorts, where the dogs sleep on queen-size beds, and the spa offerings include mud baths and blueberry facials. One pet hotel franchise on the West Coast will even pick up your dog in a Lamborghini. I knew Dogwood Acres wouldn't be quite as luxurious as that,

but the accommodations still sounded pretty nice. The website mentioned distinctive decor, cable television, and a large picture window overlooking an extra-large private outdoor patio. My plan was to stay with Steve at a string of dog hotels. Yes, four dogs only, in the mid-Atlantic region, not too far from where I live. Putting the plan into action had required making a series of deeply embarrassing phone calls. My requests were sometimes met with awkward silences, which would be followed by questions along the lines of,

awkward silences, which would be followed by questions along the lines of, you sure you want to do that? I tried to explain that staying at dog hotels would take me to the heart of some questions that I'd been thinking about a lot in recent months. How did humans start catering to the whims of canines rather than the other way around? And what if, somewhere along the way, we all became a little too obsessed with our dogs? After Steve was weighed and examined for fleas and ticks, we were escorted to our room. Everyone at Dogwood Acres was exceptionally warm and welcoming, which did nothing to lessen my fear as I walked by them, clutching my sleeping bag and rolling suitcase that they all thought I

was a total schmuck. I wanted to take each employee aside and explain that it wasn't what it seemed, that I was actually on a very serious quest to understand something important about the American condition in the 21st century. But there was nothing to be done, because of course the only thing schmuckier than staying at a facility for dogs is trying to justify it as a quest to understand something important about the American condition in the 21st century. I tried to remain positive as Steve and I made our way into the recesses of Dogwood Acres, never mind if the hallway of luxury suites had less the feel of the Ritz-Carlton than of, say, a Soviet-era Bulgarian office building. So what if the room directly across from our suite was occupied by a large black dog named Bella,

who was barking ferociously and lunging at the window facing our room? What difference did it make that someone had used a black marker to add some all-caps notes to the printed chart taped to Bella's door? Do not reach for head. Caution with sudden movements. Did it really matter that our room was significantly smaller than I anticipated, 6.5 feet by 6.5 feet, or that the extra-large private outdoor patio was surrounded by steel caging, it could have been worse. I had my sleeping bag, there was a TV, and an elegant stainless steel pail of water,

should Steve or I get thirsty. It was all, of course, entirely my own fault. Audrey Reichardt, the owner, had graciously offered to set up a cot and air mattress for me, but I insisted I wanted only what the dogs get. This is it, Reichardt said, extending her hand to the room. But you're not a dog. To be continued... time belly rub tuck in. Watching by the open door, I couldn't help thinking that if only humans were good and innocent like dogs, instead of being so weird and gross and sex-obsessed, we might have a

wider range of wholesome services like this one available at our hotels. Then I remembered that Steve might not be so good and pure around his own kind either, had I not had his testicles surgically removed. At 8pm, it was lights out. Steve got onto his dog cot with the stuffed mallard toy I'd packed. A few minutes later, I heard some deep breathing and saw that Steve was out cold, which made the whole experience lonelier, like when a friend would fall asleep first at a sleepover.

At some point, I remembered that I hadn't eaten all day. I took a few hard-boiled eggs out of my bag and looked through the window to the patio-slash-steel cage and felt it really should have been impossible, even schmuckier than before. It's not just the hotels. There are now dog bakeries and ice cream parlors and social clubs. One dog-only San Francisco cafe serves canines a $75 tasting menu. More and more restaurants, for people, also now offer dog menus. A lot of these things

probably started as jokes, but such gestures have a way of outliving their origins. At some point, throwing birthday parties for our dogs and buying them Valentine's Day gifts went from being something we did to be funny to something we just did. Total spending on pets in the United States, and dogs are by far the most popular pet, rose more than 50% between 2018 and 2022, when it reached $137 billion, according to a pet products trade association. Americans now spend more than half a billion dollars each year on pet Halloween costumes alone per the National Retail Federation. This sharp spending increase overlaps with Americans spending

approximately twice as much time with pets today as they did two decades ago. A 2023 survey found that around half of American owners believe their pet knows them better than anyone else does, including significant others and best friends. These statistics sit uncomfortably alongside the fact that the U.S. Surgeon General recently declared human loneliness an epidemic. It's hard not to wonder whether our growing obsession with dogs is somehow related to our declining interest in one another. Maybe, even as we're humanizing our dogs,

the deeper appeal is not that they're like people, but that they're not like people. Maybe, if you dig far enough beneath the surface of our dog love, you eventually arrive at a thin layer of misanthropy. My interest in America's dog mania wasn't only sociological. Several months before our trip, I found a small lump on Steve's right hind leg. The tumor turned out to be benign, but the experience left me profoundly shaken. When the veterinary surgeon told me she thought it was cancer, I had to sit in the car for 10 minutes to regain my composure before driving home. Every time I looked over and saw Steve's breathtakingly goofy face, encircled by his

dumb plastic cone, I started to cry again. Before this cancer scare, I probably would have said that the expanding place of dogs in American life was a good thing, that a world that revolves around dogs is a better world. It was only after I realized how unready I was to lose Steve that I found myself wondering if the problem with our current dog mania might run deeper than I'd thought. I don't think of myself as particularly lonely, but I don't get together with friends in person very often anymore. The phone calls I used to have with friends have been replaced by texts. I usually work from home, and on a typical workday, I interact with many more people on Zoom than in real life.

If I need the comfort of another beating heart, the closest one around is inside Steve's ribcage. Unfortunately, if less human connection is driving us to form deeper bonds with our dogs, it's hard to conclude that dogs are actually solving our problems. that dogs are actually solving our problems. The most surprising finding in the field of anthrozoology, which studies human-animal relationships, might be that there's no conclusive link between pets and well-being. In 2021, Megan Mueller at Tufts University discovered that pet owners were twice as likely to report being depressed as those without pets. The finding was only an association. We can't really say whether pets are responsible for that depression or if depressed people are simply more likely to have pets.

Still, the mismatch between our personal experience with the animals that we love and what the research says is a complete mystery, Hal Herzog, an anthrozoologist and emeritus professor at Western Carolina University, told me. Most studies don't show that pet owners are happier, that pet owners are less depressed, that pet owners go to the doctor less. The next morning, at Dogwood Acres, the staff threw a birthday party for Steve in a gated yard. Steve's birthday was less than two months away, so I told myself the request was legit. A dozen dogs ran around happily in a sea of toys. There was a bubble machine and a tub full

of colorful plastic balls. Steve, decked out in a handsome birthday boy bandana, immediately picked up a stuffed bone. And because I know there's nothing he loves more than making a complete mockery of me in a game of chase, I ran after him. Our next stop was a presidential suite at Holiday Barn Pet Resorts, just outside Richmond, Virginia. Each Holiday Barn suite had a different regional theme. Ours was Annapolis, and the suite's orange and white walls featured tasteful maritime decor, including a little blue shelf holding an antique

beer stein and tiny pitchers. It was so nice, 7.5 feet by 8 feet, that I didn't care at all that Hartley, the golden retriever staying down the hall, had the considerably fancier Mount Vernon suite, which featured a painting of George Washington and a tubular light fixture that called to mind Dan Flavin. This business, which has been family-run since it opened in Glen Ellyn, Virginia in 1972, was originally called Holiday Barn Pet Kennel,

and the dogs stayed in cages attached to outdoor kennel runs. You had vermin coming in, the resort owner, Hughes recalled, all of a sudden you look and there's a raccoon in there, or a possum, or snake. Not long after it opened, Hughes's parents began hiring teenage petters. At the time, tending to the emotional needs of a dog in a kennel was considered novel. Today, dog boarding establishments have to focus most on the emotional needs of pet parents, as owners are known in the industry. Hughes mentioned a holiday barn guest that ate only Chick-fil-A sandwiches. At some dog hotels, suites have cameras and emails from concerned owners arrive throughout the night. San Francisco's Pet Camp once received a frantic call from a woman

who wanted to know why her dog had come home with an erection. The hoteliers denied responsibility for the erection. A dog hotel in Pennsylvania once had to make time for a pet parent who insisted on calling in each day to play the kazoo to her dog. Pet parents is a term of modern creation, although pet has a longer history. The word first came into use in the early 1500s, and from the beginning, it could refer not only to animals, but also to people, particularly spoiled children. James Serple, an emeritus professor of animal welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the origin of humans keeping pets can probably be traced to the human tendency to respond to young animals in the same way we respond to small children. It's an extension

of our parenting instincts. We have extended our parenting instincts so far, it seems, that the distinction between pets and children has evaporated altogether. And pet industry experts say the relentless humanizing of our dogs has been accelerated by millennials and Gen Z, who now make up the largest share of dog owners in the country, and who often have a first dog before a first child. Americans in their 20s and 30s nowadays have a lot of spare parental love in their hearts, and their dogs are lapping it up. I slept well at Holiday Barn. The next morning, before leaving, I helped Steve into a dog life jacket so he could splash around in the bone-shaped pool. I put on some rubber boots and

clomped around after him while two chocolate labs took turns swimming laps. The previous few days were overcast, but the sun was out now, and I was overcome with an I-could-really-get-used-to-this feeling, before I realized I was now fantasizing about extending my stay at a dog resort. I knew before I arrived that the old-town pet resort in Dulles, Virginia, where Steve and I would be spending the last night of our trip, would be the fanciest of our destinations, but I was wowed just the same. The lobby had a sculpture of a pointer and a glass wall with a view of the heated indoor pool. It was nicer than the lobby of most human hotels I'd stayed in. When I later interviewed Ron Halligan, president and chief executive of Old Town Pet Resorts.

He told me his job came with some special challenges. It's like running an acute care retirement facility. They all have to be taken to the bathroom. We have a med cart. Half of them are on meds. After we checked in, a friendly young man named Jonathan Neal led Steve through an agility session, during which Steve jumped through hoops and walked along ramps and elevated planks. Neal then changed into a wetsuit to oversee Steve's swimming session,

which involved leading a very unamused Steve back and forth across the 20-foot-long pool. Though I'd arranged to stay at a luxury suite at Old Town, there was a concern that the dogs there might smell me, and that this could be upsetting to them. So Steve and I were put up in an otherwise unoccupied wing, comprising essentially large, roofless cages. It was probably for the best. I wasn't particularly in the mood to watch Happy Feet, which was playing on the TVs in the suites that night. A cot had been set up for me, and I was too tired to refuse it. It was hardly big enough for a person, but Steve, forgoing his own dog-size cot, climbed up with me. Then William Tyler, the executive director of the hotel at the time, stopped by our cage. Tyler, a middle-aged former Marine and a good-sized man,

got down on the floor, inches away from us, and began to read Steve his bedtime story, a book about Clifford the Big Red Dog saving people from a fire. When Tyler finished reading, he said goodnight to us and turned out the lights. I curled around Steve as best I could on the cot, feeling grateful that he was there with me. But I wondered about Steve's feelings, too. Over the course of my time living in the lap of canine luxury, I became more convinced than ever that a world with more dog love is a better world. Yet I also met quite a few human beings in the bespoke pet care industry who, having observed all parties up close, expressed their anxieties about the extent of our devotion. When humans include animals in everything they do, the dog doesn't know how to

be a dog, Hughes had told me. Lying there on this last night, I wished Steve could tell me what he thought of the whole thing. In the morning, Steve got a mud bath at Old Town Spa and a blueberry facial, and then, after Steve was blown out and brushed and sprayed with a dog cologne, it was time to drive home. It had been a good trip. As we drove back, I stroked Steve's head at red lights and felt only a little bit like a schmuck. Thank you.