Crazy Things Can Happen When You’re Away!
Why your petsitter should have pet sitting insurance
When I first started cat sitting, which was a career that chose me over 20 years ago, I wanted to join our local petsitter group to learn more. Capital Area Professional Pet Sitters (CAPPS) has been around for over 25 years. I honestly don’t even remember how I heard about the group. I describe it to people as sort of “pet sitter group therapy.” CAPPS members have a casual get-together once a month, but more on that another day.
CAPPS requires members to be professional pet sitters. Part of being a professional includes having pet sitting insurance. When I asked about joining, I was told that I needed to get this insurance. I had never heard of it, but quickly researched the topic and signed up for coverage.
I would guess that most people have not heard of pet sitting insurance and have no idea what it covers. Like any other type of insurance, sitters can buy different levels of coverage. But, the general idea is that if something goes wrong with your pets or your home while your pet sitter is responsible, the pet sitter can file a claim with the insurance company to cover some or all of the cost of expenses incurred in making the situation right.
I have made one insurance claim in all of my years of cat sitting. I was in North Carolina, the client was out of the country, and I had two employees taking care of an elderly, diabetic cat for a week. One person was handling the morning visits and one person was handling the evening visits. Diabetic cats get insulin injections, very much like people do. Unfortunately, until recently, it wasn’t easy to check a cat’s blood sugar at home, and it wasn’t something anyone asked a pet sitter to do. (These days, a cat can wear a continuous glucose monitor for a certain number of days.)
Diabetic cats have the same risk as humans, and they should eat before they get their twice per day insulin injections. Older and underweight cats are harder to manage. If you are pet sitting you really don’t know how much a cat has eaten while you’ve been gone, especially if there are multiple cats in the home. Elderly cats can have other risk factors.
I got a call from my evening employee that the cat wasn’t looking good. I had her take the cat to the emergency veterinary clinic, and thank goodness she could fit that into her schedule. I got ahold of the owner, and the owner’s local contact, and we spent a lot of time on the phone.
Fortunately for all of us, especially the cat, the cat made it! She actually lived a couple more years and moved to a new home during that time. Even so, making the insurance claim was very emotional. The insurance people seemed used to that, and they were very comforting. I was literally crying on the phone, which I didn’t expect.
An insurance person called me to go over what happened. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and the insurance person wasn’t interested in blame. He just needed the sequence of events and who did what. All expenses were completely covered by the insurance. Back then that was about $4,000 plus extra employee pay and the cost of the client’s cell phone bills.
What other types of things would you want your pet sitter to have insurance for? Here are several events:
Your cat gets out of your home and is hit by a car and has to go the the ER
Your cat gets out of your home and is found injured and and has to go the the ER
Your cat gets out of your home and is found ok, but the cat’s rabies vaccination is expired, and she will need to get a rabies shot and maybe a booster.
You cat ate a plastic bag and now Kitty needs emergency surgery.
The sitter loses the key to your home and you need to have your home rekeyed
The sitter messes up the schedule and visits are missed and your cat seems ok, but should get checked out by a veterinarian.
The cat turns on the kitchen faucet while you are gone, something was blocking the drain, and the sink overflows. Now you need repairs.
The pet sitter runs the dishwasher to clean the cat dishes, but she leaves it running when she is gone; the dishwasher breaks and floods the kitchen.
A petsitter’s vehicle slides on ice in your driveway and damages a fence or your garage door. Now repairs are needed.
Pet sitter forgets to lock up the home and it is burglarized while he is gone.
How do you know if your petsitter has insurance? Ask! Ask for the petsitter to email or print out a pet sitting insurance certificate for you. I am including a copy of my pet sitting insurance certificate so you can get an idea of what to look for.
As you can see, an insurance certificate should list what exactly is covered by the policy, and what the payout limits are. The certificate should list the pet sitter’s name, address, contact info, and a policy number. (I blanked mine out for this image.) The name of the insurance company should be on the certificate.
It’s not hard to have an insurance claim of thousands of dollars. Fortunately, cat claims tend to be a lot lower than dog claims, as cats get into a lot less trouble less frequently than dogs! Even so, you can count on one night in the veterinary emergency clinic to be over $1,000. It adds up fast. Emergency surgery can be over $10,000.
Be aware that pet sitting insurance does not cover work-related injuries to your pet sitter, on your property. Any type of injury to a worker on your property should be covered by workers compensation insurance. It’s a rare self-employed person who insures themselves this way (I do), but any pet sitting company employees must be covered by workers compensation insurance under New York State Law. I’ll cover this in a future article!
If you own a home, you might think that your homeowner’s insurance would cover something like a petsitter being injured on your property. Unfortunately, insurance companies are cancelling insurance policies over things as simple as two claims in a year for your own home issues. Any worker at your home should really have their own insurance!
Cat Volunteers Merge Brains!
Getting a bunch of cat shelter volunteers to do the same thing is kind of like, well, herding cats! New challenge: all volunteers must have completed training required under the new New York State Companion Animal Care Standards Act within 60 days of being assigned the training. Everyone needs to have shared expectations of their responsibilities, even as volunteers, in an animal shelter.
Fortunately, the state is allowing shelters to make use of a variety of free resources. The cat shelter I volunteer with is using ASPCA Learn’s NYS Companion Animal Care Standards Act online training. We can each learn at home, or on-the-go, on our own time, using the online tutorials. Volunteers have reported that it doesn’t work well on a phone or in the Safari browser. Luckily, I heard those reports before I started the training.
The training has to include information about:
humane handling techniques
infectious diseases commonly found in animal shelters
zoonotic diseases (diseases that people can get from animals)
animal cruelty
sanitation procedures
body language and normal behaviors for all species regularl handled, and
required documentation and data entry
The ASPCA course is easy to follow, and it doesn’t give grades. It allows me to read the information as many times as I like, and I can take the quizzes more than once (good thing!). It is mostly reading, but also includes some videos. For example, one video shows how to properly put on and remove personal protective equipment, such as disposable booties over shoes and a disposable gown, to cover clothing, before entering or leaving a room with sick animals.
Laundry sanitation is required in animal shelters!
Downsides to cat shelter volunteers is having to learn about dog handling and other dog topics. It is interesting, but we don’t need that information at all for our volunteer work.
The whole course should take three to four hours. I can’t sit still that long, so I do one segment, and then go back days later to the next segment. Once you log in to take the training, the software keeps track of what segments you have completed and will open the next lesson next time you log in. Right now I am procrastinating finishing it by writing this article instead.
Training is supposed to be provided to volunteers within their first 60 days at the shelter, and then at least once a year, for all volunteers. Obviously, this training wasn’t available before now, so we’re all taking it for the first time.
A volunteer at the cat shelter has to formally document the date of training delivery and completion, the training session topics, the training provider, and a list of training course attendees. This documentation must be kept on file for at least three years, for state inspection. It’s a big job chasing down a over a couple hundred volunteers to make sure they get this done on time!
This is all new, but it will give volunteers shared references when talking about concerns and protocols at shelters so this is a good thing! Don’t be afraid to sign up at your local shelter and learn more about animal care as part of your volunteer duties!
Tails from the Feeding Station
Last week I left you with a brief introduction to two kittens, outside in January 2025, fending for themselves. Today I am going to continue with that story, but first I want to set up some framework for the whole stray cat rescue situation.
You have probably heard of TNR, Trap, Neuter, Return, or more commonly referred to these days as TNVR (V for vaccinate). Some people strongly believe in doing TNVR, some are against it. I want to say that I hate it, but I do it when I have to, in hopes that I will be able to catch the cats again in the future, so that I can take then indoors when I have space. You can google TNR and read all about it on your own. TNVR cats should be provided with outdoor shelters, food, and water, when possible.
The thing I tell myself to keep going, and get through it is, “I am doing the best I can with other people’s bad decisions.” What I mean by that is these cats are not living outside by accident. People are responsible.
Shelters are usually full, and foster homes are hard to come by. TNVR at least prevents cats from reproducing and making the stray cat problem worse when you have no other options for them. I can sometimes find a foster home after I catch a cat, but I always plan on the fact that I am probably going to have to bring the cat home and have space for it — away from my own cats — for at least a few days between capture, surgery, and recovery.
The kittens I mentioned last week were born outside, so the bad decisions probably started before their mom. She was trapped after the kittens were, and she was 100% feral, so she was most likely born outside, herself. She was very fortunate to land a permanent spot in the Albany-based Whiskers cat shelter, where she can live out her life if she never becomes adoptable.
As I walk you through this kitten-trapping-fostering-adopting-out scenario, I will list the equipment I use, just to give you an idea of the tools I used, in case you find yourself doing this one day, I have learned what tools make the job the easiest, over the years, from other cat rescue volunteers. You can often borrow most of what you need from another cat person.
Once I located the kittens and saw where they were hiding, the next step was to set up an insulated shelter for them (remember, it was January), a heated water bowl (about $25), and dry food. Canned food would freeze. I could have added a heated food bowl to the set up, but I wasn’t planning on taking too long to catch the kittens, so dry food would do. I also wanted to use canned food as a lure for the humane trap, later. The canned food would smell good and be more interesting than dry food.
I got permission from the property owner to set up the kitten capture equipment. Getting permission is important; if you try to set up traps without permission, you might have unhappy people stealing your traps.
I also set up a trail camera, with a cellphone subscription plan, so that it would send photos to my phone, within minutes of taking them. I was able to set that up at an angle to give the property owner privacy, and aim it just at the cat food area. The owner set up an outdoor outlet from the base of a light bulb outside, and also loaned me an extension cord.
The insulated shelter was something I already had. It was just a good-sized plastic container with a Omaha Steaks cooler inside, filled with straw. So maybe another $25 for the bin and the straw … of course I had to buy a whole bale. Steak costs not included!
I later bought two fancy, larger, sturdier insulated shelters for the ongoing cat project, which were $120 each.
Trail camera — you can get a decent one for about $140. The one I have now takes 12(!) AA batteries, so that is an extra cost. Frigid temperatures drain batteries very quickly, so I buy lithium batteries for the winter. Those batteries are quite a bit more expensive, but when the nighttime temperatures are below 0 degrees F., I probably save money on batteries since I don’t have to replace them every few days.
The cell phone plan for the camera I have runs about $120 for a year’s worth of unlimited photos. Remember, you get a lot of photos of birds, raccoons, opposites, mice, and more! Unlimited is the way to go!
I set all of that up, and the next step was to see what time the kittens would come to eat. Especially since it was January, I had to plan capture times and hang around to bring the captured kitten into my car right away. It was too cold outside to let them linger in the trap very long.
Unfortunately, with the “curse of the trail camera,” as one of my friends calls it, I started to see photos of other stray cats. I think about four or five different cats were coming to eat. Well, at first I thought there were fewer cats, but it turned out that one black-and-white cat was actually also a gray-and-white cat. One white and tabby cat was actually two different white and tabby cats. More on those another week!
The kittens mainly came to eat after dark. I set up the traps next, making sure they stayed open and wouldn’t close, with food in them, to get the kittens to go into the traps to eat. This can take a couple of days. My favorite trap is called a Tru-Catch. You can buy a cat-sized one for around $120.
All the while, I went back every day to feed and change the water. Raccoons were eating the food as well, and making a muddy mess of the water every night.
It took more than one setting of the trap, but I caught the orange kitten. He was nervous at first, of course, almost everyone tries to break out of the trap and they are extra scared when a human approaches. But, as you can see in the photo of him in the back of my car, he actually wasn’t too scared. (Which reminds me, line the back of your car with a tarp! I buy a pretty good quality tarp that won’t rip easily. Prices vary!)
Next article will explain what happened with the kitten after I got him home! (And more on his brother, the black kitten!)
Orange kitten trapped!
Caught him!
The orange kitten was the first one to go into the trap. It’s normal for cats to try to break out!
Orange kitten on the way to indoor life!
Already Calm!
I loaded the orange kitten into the back of my car and snapped this photo. He seemed pretty calm!
In Summary
I wanted to let everyone know that the first newsletter had 65 subscribers and a 72.4% “open rate.” From what I’ve learned, a 25% open rate is great, but we are kind of “cheating” right now with all of the current subscribers being mostly customers, friends, and family. But, when we have 850,000 subscribers, you can say, “I was one of the first 65 readers!”
The artwork is from Woodland Ghost Art, available for digital downloads on Etsy.
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Thanks for reading!