From what I know about Wag, it's sort of like Uber pool. You don't get your dog walked alone, a dog walker has the option to walk as many dogs as they can to maximise their profit. Add to this a matching algorithm that doesn't pair a consistent walker with your dog every day, and you get a situation where a new walker is pushed into taking more more responsibility than they probably should. This inherently puts dogs in an unsafe environment.

I can see a dog being excited, put with other dogs he doesn't know very well, and one dog breaking loose... running into the street while the walker holds on to the other 3 they are walking... total shit show. You want a consistent dog walker, you want someone who will put time in to get to know your dog, and you never want unfamiliar dogs around your dog unless it's properly supervised.

The whole situation, in my opinion, is prone to disastrous outcomes. Can you imagine if AirBnB booked multiple families to a site at a time? We'd all flip out. But it's OK for our dogs... likely because when we're at work we don't know what goes on, out of site, out of mind.

I agree with this, it's an obvious train wreck. Dog walkers have to be known and trusted. Our neighbors suspected something was wrong with their dog walker because their dog was suddenly really antsy when they got home and always acted up. They put in a hidden nanny cam and turned out the dog walker was coming over, hanging out on their couch texting and watching TV and never actually took the dog out. Poor thing.

Then in SF another dog walker got busted for driving around picking up all her dogs, but leaving them inside her dog walking van while she went shopping at the mall instead of walking the dogs.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Incident-with-Dog-Walk...

It's so hard to trust anyone to actually take care of your dog, why automatically dilute to a gig economy with no oversight where just get any rando with a record who can buy a fake Wag account on reddit for their burner phone.

This is why we bring our dog to a doggy daycare where we can watch him play on webcams all day. But even that's not 100% safe, the workers could be not watching, or whatever.

It's just like eldercare. If you want to be sure it's done properly you basically have to do it yourself.

As the old saying goes, there are some things that money can't buy. Trust is one of them.

Their FAQ at https://wagwalking.com/faq claims:

> Do you walk my dog with other people's dogs?

>> No! Here at Wag!, your pup is our sole focus on each walk. We believe that each pup has different needs, and the best way to serve those needs is through a one-on-one experience. In the case that you have multiple dogs in your household, we will walk those pups together per your request.

So either that's a straight-up lie or you're confusing them with some other dog walking service.

It seems that some Wag walkers do walk more than one dog at a time:

http://www.ktvu.com/news/wag-dog-walker-charged-with-animal-...

>> I don’t know what rules Wag have, but calling the owner as soon as possible and stating what has happened is a pretty basic thing to do.

If you were owning/operating your own dog-walking service, sure, because you'd care about your reputation.

Wag appears to be yet another gig economy outfit, though, so the person delivering the actual service cares little (or not at all?) about the reputation of the intermediate service company.

If things go badly wrong, as the service provider you'd just walk away. The service company certainly doesn't care about you, why should you care about them?

I agree, but it is easy to understand why the walker wouldn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. I’ve house sat friend’s pets, and the thought of my accidentally killing one and having to break the news is viscerally painful.