Four-Legged Clients A Challenge Professional Pet Sitters Share Their Most Traumatizing Tales Of Horror

Sometime soon I expect to see “pet sitter” listed right after actuarial analyst, biotechnician and bond trader in one of those articles touting hot careers for recent college graduates.

According to Pet Sitters International, the profession is one of the fastest-growing in the United States. People seem to be traveling more and working longer hours. Increasingly, their animals are stuck at home with little to do but watch television and chew on bones.

Enter the expert sitter - dedicated to keeping pet mood swings and household destruction in check.

Because professional pet sitters take pride in keeping things under tight control when they’re on the job, I thought it might be fun to ask two of the best area practitioners for their most terrifying, out-of-control pet-care experiences. Here are their horror stories.

The creature from the living room sofa: It was a dark and stormy night - well, not really. It was in fact a perfectly normal evening last spring when Alison Hamilton of Newport, R.I., who runs Pet Sitters there, went to the home of one of her regular clients - “a very gentle, nicely mannered 7-year-old Dalmatian.”

To her surprise, the normally dependable client is nowhere to be found, even after a search of the premises.

“I come back into the living room,” remembers Hamilton, “right behind the sofa and happen to look down. She’s there, sound asleep, and when I say, ‘There you are!’ - this dog suddenly wakes up, leaps and bites me right on the mouth.”

When Hamilton puts her hand to her mouth, she realizes it’s warm and wet, and “then I see a river of blood pouring down onto the white cotton ticking-stripe couch and onto the floor.” The client realizes what she’s done - she’s never bitten anyone before - and slinks over to Hamilton shaking like a leaf.

Pressing a paper towel to her lips, Hamilton does the following things one-handed: Tries to wipe things up, takes her client outside to “go,” throws dog biscuits down the basement stairs so client will follow, locks client in, sets alarm, drives her own dog (who’s been waiting in her car) home - using a stick-shift! - and zooms to the hospital.

It turns out that The Creature from the Living Room Sofa has made Hamilton look a lot like The Bride of Frankenstein. She needs eight stitches in one cut and five in another and is finally released from the hospital at 2 a.m.

Cringing with pain as the Novocain begins to wear off, she tries to compose a note to the owners. Her opening sentence cuts right to the bone: “The blood on your sofa,” she writes, “is because. … ” As it turns out, the family is more embarrassed than anything else and afraid Hamilton won’t want to sit for The Creature ever again. In fact, she returns to the scene of the crime (and to the same pooch) for the whole month of August.

“That time,” she says, “the basement filled up with 6 inches of water, and I had to keep wading through to get to some guinea pigs I was feeding … but that’s another story.”

The case of the high-jumping housecat: Dodee Ise is the proprietor of Aristocats Feline Hotel in Providence, R.I. - but not all of her clients check in for a cozy night’s rest at her five-star establishment.

Ise is known for solving a series of deeply mysterious cases involving felines who have vanished into the fogshrouded streets of Rhode Island’s capital.

On one recent house call, Ise informs the owner of the two cats that, to be on the safe side, her ironclad policy is not to let the cats outside for any reason.

On her first visit, Ise opens the front door, and one of the client cats goes into a crouch (the owner had warned her of this). Before she can react, the client somehow leaps onto Ise’s shoulder and uses it as a springboard to bound out the door behind her.

“I was so stunned,” says Ise. “I’d never seen anything like this.”

Several times, Ise gets close to the escaped feline in the driveway, but the client always jumps away at the last minute. Soon she’s slinking around in the bushes like a ghost - Ise can hear her, not see her - and when Ise lunges into this dark forest of greenery, the client is off like a bat into neighboring yards.

Ise tries opening the side door to the house, placing an open can of tuna there on the steps, and making “dinner noises” by clinking a spoon on a dish.

“Every other cat in the neighborhood ate from this dish,” says Ise. “But not this cat.

“I knew I couldn’t leave even though I had other cats to sit for. And it would be a week until the owner was due back.”

Ise confesses that she began to pray: “Please, please, please God,” the sitter pleads, “please let that cat come back.”

“For 20 minutes I prayed,” says Ise, “and with God as my judge, I hear a faint meow at the front door. When I open it, there she is. She just trots past me into the living room as if to say, ‘What’s the big deal?”’

From that day forward, Ise notes, she’s never taken a case without bringing along a kit of professional “tools,” including a pop-top can of tuna, a flashlight for crawling in bushes and a spray bottle to whip up a catproof barrier of mist when she’s letting herself in the door.