My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag • Hacker News Board

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#101

Post by exogeny » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

scott-smith_us wrote: post #72

gafferongames wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OH COME ON!

Please explain why wanting to hear both sides of a story gets an "OH COME ON!" from you?

It gets a "OH COME ON!" because it's completely irreverent. The actual story here doesn't actually matter. A dog is dead, and there's no recovering from bungling the PR of something that sensitive.

Everything in the world is a matter of understanding the marginal impact. There is no universe in which hearing both sides of the story (or trying to save n number of dollars) results in a better net outcome for Wag as a business than apologizing profusely and visibly showing as much empathy as possible.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#102

Post by dsl » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:30 AM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #36

celestialcheese wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. It should have been the easiest decision in the world for them - a persons' dog is more important than most other humans to most dog owners, yet the law treats dogs as nothing more than property. Pay up and grovel to these people. In-action doesn't make these things go away. EDIT: just read the non-disclosure section. I understand the impulse to do that, but it's a MUCH better gamble to just kill the story…

> a persons' dog is more important than most other humans to most dog owners, yet the law treats dogs as nothing more than property Something I've always found particularly infuriating is how police dogs are considered officers and often carries a worse punishment than attacking an actual police officer. Not because I am upset that the dogs are being protected, but that the police basically can shoot other people's d…

Police dogs are not actual officers, as they can not meet the training and oath requirements.

I'm not aware of any laws protecting the dogs specifically other than general animal cruelty laws. But because they are very expensive to train (I know of a bomb dog that cost $30k+) you are facing felony property damage charges if you injure or disable them.

You should take a break.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#103

Post by b3b0p » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #50

If he care the dog so much, the question is why is he trusting it to some stranger ?

Maybe he loves his dog such that he is willing to go out of his way and even pay someone to walk the dog when life outside of home happens.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#104

Post by onion2k » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:33 AM UTC

scott-smith_us wrote: post #72

gafferongames wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OH COME ON!

Please explain why wanting to hear both sides of a story gets an "OH COME ON!" from you?

We do have Wag's side of the story. They decided to only reimburse costs if a customer signs an NDA, and then they decided to revoke their offer when the customer refused to sign.

Wag don't need to add anything more than that for us to know they care more about a very small amount of money than the dogs customers entrust to the care of the walkers they employ.

To be honest the money is actually a small and distracting aspect of this story. If it was my dog I'd want to know what happened. The fact Wag won't give any proper answers shows they probably don't know what's happening to dogs people trust their walkers with. That is a HUGE problem for me.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#105

Post by logifail » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #75

idontpost wrote: post #7

Incredibly stupid decision to respond this way by Wag. How bad to you have to be at PR to screw this up? It's not hard. Liability in the case of harmed pets is extremely limited, so you just pay it all and apologize profusely. There's no way the bad press will be worth saving a couple thousand maximum. Absolute idiots.

Missing from the discussion as far as I can see is mention of the walker’s behaviour. 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. Deliver the bad news to those that need it as quickly and accurately as you can, with updates when appropriate. Not answering then lying is not ok, and whatever Wags’s rules are this shouldn’t have…

>> 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?

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#106

Post by philwelch » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

scott-smith_us wrote: post #72

gafferongames wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OH COME ON!

Please explain why wanting to hear both sides of a story gets an "OH COME ON!" from you?

Hearing corporate excuses from a fucking dog walking startup that got someone's dog killed couldn't possibly improve my opinion of them.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#107

Post by mrob » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:37 AM UTC

kdf83 wrote: post #95

cgriswald wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing Wag screwed up was its total lack of empathy in trying to buy silence. > a couple thousand maximum Maximum? Many pups cost more than this and you'd be paying to replace at least. You might also be paying for any amount of vet bills if the animal isn't killed on the spot. If you hit a service or working dog, be ready to shell out tens of thousands for replacement due to the unique tasks performed (not all do…

"In any case, Wag and its walker are probably not at fault. I'd be after the driver." Have you considered the dog was at fault? I mean unless the leash is incredible short it would be pretty easy to jump into an oncoming car if pavement is small. Playing devil advocate here but since we've considered Wag, the walker and driver surely we can consider the animal at fault too unless the lease was 20cms and dog was pract…

A dog is an animal. It has no moral responsibility. If a dog does something wrong the fault lies with the person in charge who failed to control it. A professional dog walker should be aware of traffic and anticipate how the dog might react.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#108

Post by WillPostForFood » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:37 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #75

idontpost wrote: post #7

Incredibly stupid decision to respond this way by Wag. How bad to you have to be at PR to screw this up? It's not hard. Liability in the case of harmed pets is extremely limited, so you just pay it all and apologize profusely. There's no way the bad press will be worth saving a couple thousand maximum. Absolute idiots.

Missing from the discussion as far as I can see is mention of the walker’s behaviour. 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. Deliver the bad news to those that need it as quickly and accurately as you can, with updates when appropriate. Not answering then lying is not ok, and whatever Wags’s rules are this shouldn’t have…

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.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#109

Post by philwelch » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

defap wrote: post #37

yegle wrote: post #11

This happened recently: Wag! dog walker charged with animal cruelty; customers concerned about industry background checks http://www.ktvu.com/news/wag-dog-walker-charged-with-animal-... EDIT: and the settlement letter sent from Wag: https://www.scribd.com/document/397139013/SNews-Copie1901081...

Wow. The walker kicks and whips the dog until it vomits blood and Wag offers a refund and a $100 credit as settlement. Who in the world wants Wag credits after an experience like that. If Wag wants to buy these folks’ silence, shouldn’t they at least make a non-insulting offer?

If that was my pet, I might settle for the opportunity to kick and whip each and every cofounder until they vomit blood.

Re: My dog was killed on a walk with a walker ordered through Wag

#110

Post by james_s_tayler » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #74

james_s_tayler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely seems they could and need to do more to tighten up the accountability on the platform. No doubt about that. I don't know that it's accurate to say the contractor doesn't care. If they were a psychopath I could agree with that, but most people have had the experience of having either a pet, friend or relative die and know how deeply it affects people emotionally and to know you were responsible for that…

> Edit: Platforms don't kill dogs; people do. Stop trusting people. I disagree with that notion. Trust has always been a big problem. But when a two way market is built on a platform you trust the platform to carry out it's due diligence on your behalf. Situations like: The walker that was with Winnie when she was killed had a different name in her bio paragraph than was shown on her profile—which makes me wonder if…

I also disagree with my own notion. And I don't.

> It takes a good and concentrated effort to run a clean platform

Precisely. It's hard. Because people. So I can imagine that without the platform and hence no way to actually have a concentrated effort to do the work required to up the quality you still get the garbage that people bring but without the observability or feedback loop to the entity because they're all just localised cases.

But this is my point. It's people that run the platforms and it's people that partake in them. It's people that choose to trust them and it's people that can't be trusted. It's all ultimately a people problem. The platform is just a mechanism to coordinate the actions of people. It's not like this stuff never happens outside of platforms and now that you have platforms platforms are causing this stuff to happen.

Caveat: it may be the case platforms cause this stuff to happen due to the type of actors they attract because the economics of certain things actually scale poorly along one axis and brilliantly along another. I address this elsewhere and am happy to concede it.

I agree with you. I actually do. I also hope on some level you agree with me too. We want things to be convenient and safe and it takes time and collateral damage for things to mold themselves into the right shape.

Coordination of good behavior is a hard, hard, problem to solve. It's not like the default state is "uncoordinated good behavior". Rather it seems to progress through states of "uncoordinated bad behavior", "coordinated bad behavior", "coordinated good behavior".

From what I can see of the sharing economy experiment, once you coordinate things you get to coordinated bad behavior and then from there it takes a few incidents to honestly compute the real risks and appropriate responses and appropriate changes are made and you wind up with coordinated good behavior.

That's a loose model and I'm sure someone out there can present a much better one than me, but I'm willing to at least say the analysis is in the right direction.