What do I do if I think a client is neglecting their dogs?
I'm sorry, this is going to be a long post. I've been sitting on this for a while now and I think the situation has become unmanageable.
First, some background: This client has me walking one of her two dogs once a day every weekday. The dog she's paying me to walk, who is about 10 months and who I call Crate Dog, has a lot of issues. He hoards resources to the point that if he has free access to water he'll drink until he throws up. I was also told he was crate trained - this has proven to be very false.
The concerns: Crate Dog poops and pees in his crate almost every day. His crate isn't big enough for him to do it in a corner so he has to lay in it until I get there to let him out. At first, I was spending an extra half hour there every day cleaning up and giving him a bath. That ended up being unsustainable, but his owner assured me he'd get cleaned up. Fast forward a few weeks, and I honestly don't think they've given him a bath once. He reeks and the white patches of his fur have turned a yellowish brown.
I'm also confident the owner is not cleaning up after any additional messes he makes. The floor under his crate - because the crate liner "broke" before I started walking him and they have yet to replace it - has chunks of poop dried onto it that no amount of scraping on my end has been able to clean.
Their second dog, a two-ish year old poodle, they've had for much longer and I was again assured that he was house trained. Unsurprisingly, he also often goes to the bathroom in the house. Since he's left out of his crate, he gets into the copious amounts of trash they have lying around, and I've often found things like chewed up cigarette butts in his poop. Their house reeks so badly at this point that I can smell it before I even open the front door.
What I've tried: I clean up after the dogs every day. I pick up the poop, wipe up the pee, and mop the entire floor. I have repeatedly requested that the client clean their dogs and give them longer walks in the morning. I have also repeatedly told them that Crate Dog is not crate trained, although with a lot of bribery I've trained him to go into his crate when I get my keys to leave. Often, I will ask the client questions about what they're doing with their dogs for things like meal time, walk length, or toys, and will not get a response.
Why I think the dogs are being mistreated: Aside from the obvious health hazards of having a house literally caked in dog poop, I don't think that this ...